I finally checked out Zillow.com and found the estimates to be pretty close to what the homes are selling for in my neck of the woods.

Do you find this to be true in your area or are they completely off?

opinions please.

Thanks

If it can't find the street I live on, how can it give a realistic value?.

off by about 10-15% in my area. BTW there are a number of these sites now... not just Zillow.

Zillow has already cost me a sale.

By Zillows own figures, its within 10% of the price 75% of the time. 10% is still a big difference.

I use Zillow for a quick Value of surrounding properties when I have the seller on the phone so I have an instant snapshot on the numbers we are talking about. And that's about it.

Their satelite/street hybrid view is really powerful and extremely helpful.

But I only trust my old MLS and Tax Records to do a more serious CMA whenever things get more serious with any client.

So far cross-referencing Zillow with a more thorough and professional CMA, like stated above me they are usually off by 10-15%

Zillow is also useless when it comes to talk about Active and Expires, these listings are priceless when it come to shape an asking price with a dubious and/or unrealistic seller

Zillow is nowhere near accurate in the area I'm in. The only "zestimate" it'll show me is what the tax records indicate. As an appraiser, it is very frustrating to hear comments about Zillow, as there is no way it can replace human emotion or calculate outside factors such as traffic. If you care to read more of my anger towards Zillow, click here.

Ben & Stacia Goheen
Keller Williams Premier Realty
Stillwater, MN
www.thegoheens.com

Zillow is totally off track in my market area as it pulls comparables from a poor area in my city and a rich area on the water in a different town (with low taxes, better school system, etc.) to come up with a figure. It does have a feature which allows you to pick and choose the comparables. Using that feature I find that most homeowners are pretty good at knowing which homes are comparables to their own home and Zillow estimates become more accurate. Of course most people won't take the time to figure out how to do that.

The only time I recommended zillow to a client was when we both knew her value was $1.25, a neighbor offered her $1M, and zillow said $1.35.
A broken clock is right twice a day too.
--A

Money magazine had an article where they compared zillow, myhousevalue, a personal appraisal and couple other website to appraised the value of the house. Zillow did the worst...and the best was personal appraisal and Realtor.

Heck they don't even have SD... What good are they LOL!

RealEstateismylife- Zillow's accuracy is dependent on how good our data is, which varies on a county by county basis. Please reference our data coverage & zestimate accuracy sheet to find your specific county- http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracy.htm

We are not trying to hide the fact that we are not accurate everywhere. Another thing we do is provide a value range, which is another way of showing how confident we are in a specific Zestimate that we calculate. Our Director of Customer Service wrote a post on our blog highlighting this feature- http://www.zillowblog.com/zillow_blog/2006/05/home_in_the_ran.html

Please let me know if I can clarify anything else for anyone.

Wish i had that link a few weeks ago - 54% are within 10% in my area and some FSBO's were convinced their house was worth more than what i and the appraiser told them because Zillow. And we were only talking about 6k difference between the appraisal and sales price! My clients are now about to close on another house.

Zillow still has my home's worth a few thousand dollars less than what we paid for it in 2004. Its gotten better. When they started, they said our home was worth almost 25k less than what we paid for it.

Still, zillow zucks.

GregInAtlanta-
I'm sorry you feel that way. Over time, we will be adding data in addition to improving our actual algorithm that we use to calculate our Zestimates. I just wanted to note that, in Georgia, we do not have enough data to compile Zestimates. Therefore, we just show you the Market Assessed Value that comes straight from the county records (not a figure we calculate). Please see our Data Accuracy Table for the state of Georgia- http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracyGA.htm#table

Hope this helps.