I saw another blog on this and it got me to wondering... forgive me for this broken and somewhat long post, but I'm starting to wonder if our good buddies at Zillow are trying to do what they can to stir up more of a media frenzy.
I'm in Montana, which does not disclose sales data as public information so Zillow, Trulia, Cyberhomes, etc are sometimes horribly off-target. I keep an eye on the sites to see what they're projecting for values, and I found it real interesting that within the same week Zillow was featured on an AP newswire story about Americans losing $2 trillion in home values the value of my house suddenly dropped 20% without explanation, no new comps or anything. As an agent, I know better, especially in my market which has only had it's median value drop $1,000 this whole year.
I'll post my original thoughts on the Zillow press release when it came out below, I made this blog post on my website back in December:
EDIT: Check my follow up question below too!
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Zillow.com - here to scare the crap out of you
Thanks Zillow! Ok seriously, this is news that we've all been hearing about for quite some time, and now Zillow is putting numbers to it, which is very staggering.
In some markets we're seeing that people are getting killed by decreasing sales prices, they're probably not only losing gained equity, but also some of the initial investment that they put down on the house. That's scary.
Here in Montana, we're not seeing the massive "lost value" in homes, our median has held steady at $220k for quite some time now, and last I checked our average sales price has dipped by about $8,000. Also, don't believe Zillow here in Montana, we're a non-disclosure state which means that sales data is not public record.
Zillow does it's best to make a good guess in Montana, sometimes it's close! About 10 months ago when I sold my house on the west end of town I sold it for just about $228k, Zillow at the time said it was worth $219k. Now in doing another check Zillow tells me the house is worth $192k - which would be way lower than any other house selling out there. Also I checked my parents house that's in the university area, Zillow thinks that the house is worth about $333k. There's been a few sales right across the street from my parents and those averaged out to around $475k. So.... looks like Zillow's off, by a bunch.
In Montana check with a Realtor who has MLS access for value researches, we can do that, Zillow can't.
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Follow up question: Thanks for all of the responses! I'm curious to see if any of you have brokerages or associations that battle online mis-information, or are you just out there to wage the war yourselves? Would you like to see your brokerage, or local association take a more progressive role in providing accurate information?
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