Any opinions on how accurate their listed home values are? I looked up my place here in So Cal this morning and damn near choked on my coffee when in came back 783K. Paid 212 for it back in 1997.
Whatever it's worth will come in handy when the wife and I escape from here in a few years
I haven't caught up to the part of this thread where the personal insults start, so apologies for responding to the OP's question....
In urban areas where there are a lot of sales and houses are fungible, Zillow is remarkably accurate. That's because if you have a cookie cutter development and the houses are pretty much all the same, it's easy to just use the last few sales to create an estimate for the next sale.
In other areas, though, Zillow is laughable. For example, we sold a house in California a few years ago to buy the house in Montana. The Zestimate for the CA house was within a few grand of what it sold for. The estimate for the Montana house, though, wasn't even close (over estimated by several hundred thousand dollars from the actual selling price), and now that there have been a bunch of sales in the neighborhood at inflated "I'm from CA, here's a million bucks for your cottage", it's even more off.
Zillow has a very hard time taking into account the value of a historic old home in a preservation district when there are a bunch of similarly sized newer homes nearby that are priced more like commodities. I'm waiting for someone to see the Zestimate for our place and make an offer for that amount. We love where we live, but if some Google billionaire wants to throw millions at us, we'll smile and say yes.
