the Property Monger Real Estate Blog

Well, I assume if zillow has your e-mail address, you were informed this morning of their big move.  Real Estate Agents rejoice!!  As  Zillow continues to hammer it’s own nails into it’s own coffin.

So the problem/arguement is that the zestimates are innacurate, as well as some other issues like propagating lies. So I guess zillow sees the cause of their inacuracy to be a data entry problem.  So their solution is to let homeowners make adjustments to their own property, as the homeowner knows the property best, and that data will go into zillows database.

Knock, Knock, knock…. DID YOU HEAR (read) WHAT I JUST SAID (wrote)!?!?!?

Zillow is going to take the homeowners opinion of value and save it to their database!!!

So lets start the logic train:

One of the primary reasons Real Estate Agents are needed is to get a fair UNBIASED opinion of value.  Homeowners almost ALWAYS overvalue their property because they know the blood sweat and tears that went into it.  They know that it’s Italian marble, and bamboo floors, and imported whatever.  They easily mistake COST for VALUE.

Now let’s assume that zillow takes over the Real Estate industry, and everyone uses zillow.  Sellers use it to find out what their property is worth. And sellers know that buyers will look at zillow to find out what a property is worth.  And they think that knowing that, the average seller isn’t going to try to stretch that number as much as possible?!?!?!

“Now, not everyone is that immoral Jon.” (yes they are)  But ok, not everyone is that immoral, but you have to admit, there is a faction that is.  Which leads us to the other problem is that even the moral and accurate Zestimates are still going to be derived by a fraction of innaccurate zestimates!

I think I’m officially sick with joy and annoyance at the same time.