I read this post on For Sale By Locals blog (the author has an unzillowable home) and I wondered:
If unzillowables make my real estate more valuable than my neighbors’ and I list it above the zestimate, will buyers bypass looking at my home in favor of those closer (or below) the zestimate?
Hmmm….What do you think?
Thanks for the digg and the post. I’m an almost daily reader of your blog and it is one of the best out there. Fortunately I’m not selling my house anytime soon - I used it as an example in April before the perfect fitting word - unzillowable - had been coined yet! Take care Tony
Much of my market is unzillowable. Sellers would be foolish to give their homes away at the Zillow zestimates. There are very few cases of the zestimates being higher than the market value (August 2006 sales.) I am working on an entry about an unzillowable area of Columbus, it probably will be on my blog Monday.
I did a previous entry about Zillow estimates in a variety of Worthington Ohio neighborhoods, some neighborhoods are more unzillowable than others in Worthington. Unfortunately for me, the term unzillowable had not yet been added to the English language when I posted that entry. Progress.
I’m looking forward to your neighborhood analysis and examples.
Since coining the term, people have focused on the fact that one’s home (and surrounding property) is many times a somewhat unique commodity, with traits (personality?) unlike your neighbors, making its value not entirely a number crunching exercise. These unzillowable traits are more accurately quantified by human visual/sensory evaluation. And since the margin of error of a zestimate is only known AFTER a sale, it may be unwise to exclusively rely on it BEFORE the sale. And people are not doing that, acording to the poll results, unscientific though it may be.
I am waiting to see an enterprising agent be the first one to put unzillowable in their headline. Sure to attract some attention, don’t you think?
Joseph
Zillow is an interesting animal. Unfortunately, zestimates are still very arbitrary and do not reflect reality for much of the US. Hopefully most clients realize that the zestimate is based largely on tax rolls, earlier apprasals and property sales histories. It may or may not be an accurate reflection of the market.
RW
4MySales.com Agent Success Tools
Zillow does provide data & that’s a good thing, so long as it’s fresh, accurate & complete, as you point out. I think brokers and real estate agents, & consumers, already know this and will use zillow for what it’s worth, in some cases more than in others.
Thank you for commenting.