Is anyone else suffering from the Zillow Effect?
Tell you what, I am getting a big dose of it at the moment. Every time I sit down with a seller at a listing presentation and after researching, reviewing and discussion of the most recent comps in the neighborhood, the seller will say something like,'Zillow says my house is worth $(fill in a number here) more!"
This is an interesting phenomenon don't you think? Despite having a professional meet and present the facts, many sellers will much rather believe a website which uses some uknown formula, using unknown comparable sales to determine some general value price which usually I have found is always higher than a property is worth, usually @ 5% higher. Is it because Zillow is a non-interested party giving a neutral opinion that some home sellers attribute Zillow a higher authority, or could it be something else?
Could it be, that Zillow always errs on the high side of the value range deliberately? I think they do. I think the reason is that they know that homeowners being only human after all, will always want to hear what it is that they want to hear, in this case they want to believe their property is worth more than it actually is. Why? The answer may be so that property owners are attracted back to the site time and time again. Think back a couple of years, it was fun to check the stock market every day and see how much it had increased. I bet that today all of us with stock portfolios are feeling the same pain when you check your balance now and I also think that you may feel less inclined to check more than every few weeks. Armed with a high web visitation count Zillow are in a position to sell more advertising to....us...hey wait a minute!
Perhaps if we are smart enough we can use the Zillow effect to our advantage. Cyberhomes allows a handy framed download which is free to load onto your website or blog and can effectively provide a similar service.
Anyway I would be interested to hear your approaches you are taking to counter the "Zillow Effect", objection.
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