Is Zillow Affecting Your Homes Marketing?

Is ZILLOW Affecting Your Homes Value?

Unfortunately, while Zillow is a great starting point for home values, it’s not always accurate. According to Zillow's website, which I’ve copied and pasted on 4/9/2018, here is what they say.

“The Zestimate® home value is Zillow's estimated market value for an individual home and is calculated for about 100 million homes nationwide. It is a starting point in determining a home's value and is not an official appraisal. The Zestimate is automatically computed daily based on millions of public and user-submitted data points. “

So if your home’s value is lower on ZILLOW than what your appraisal says, it’s important you update it. This won’t be super easy, but it is necessary for your home’s marketability.

We suggest having a Professional Licensed Real Estate Appraiser, appraise your home and then upload those results to Zillow’s Home Evaluation Updater. It’s the only way we know works when getting Zillow to change their mind about your home’s value because it is based on a professionals opinion and not your own. If you contact Zillow on your own without a professional Real Estate Appraisal, here is the likely response you will get per Zillow’s website:

“We do not delete Zestimates. We monitor customer feedback for systematic issues with the algorithm, but do not change individual Zestimates in response to customer feedback. The Zestimate is designed to be a neutral, unbiased estimate of the fair market value of a home, based on publicly available and user-submitted data. For this purpose, it is important that it be based on identical information about homes (e.g., beds, baths, square footage, lot size, tax assessment, prior sale price) and that the algorithm itself be consistently applied to all homes in a similar manner. This ensures that there is no preference for some homes relative to others nor are there valuations based on facts that are not accessible to all Zillow users. Some homes may be very unique in ways that are not well captured by existing data, and the Zestimate may be less accurate on these homes. To provide more data on your Zestimate, you can post your estimated value and comment in the Owners Estimate section.”

Sorry, I don’t have an easier answer to this question but sometimes it is what it is. Feel free to contact our office to schedule a Real Estate Appraisal for your home today by calling us at 480-595-0188 or visiting us online at www.SunPointAppraisals.com.

 

Angie Johnson
VP | Business Development
SunPointVMS