They seem a little inflated to me... also houston realtors do you think the market will still be a sellers market.. will the OG affect the housing market
We just had our house in Austin appraised for a refinance and the official appraisal came back $130k over the Zillow estimate. I was surprised by how much the appraisal came out over Zillow. I think that a few of the comps on the appraisal were wrong but I'm not complaining.
I think the average home buyers and sellers would be done a great service by being given a strong refresher course in exactly what a commodity is..........and how homes are the antithesis of a commodity. Any appraisal of a home value....be it a "zestimate," an appraisal district's assessment, or a "professional" appraisers assessment are nothing but starting points. And sometimes, not very good ones.
Zillow sucks. I fought my tax appraisals and won two years in a row. Each time Zillow drops my 'market value' to match my new tax value. So clearly it's not based on comps or any other market factors.
Want to find out how much your house is worth? Sell your house. Short of that, it is anybody's guess.
Thx for the lesson on how to use public records, y'all. But OPs question is: Are Zillows number real prices for what a house sold for at a specific time. Or can buyers/sellers/agents fudge the numbers. No one actually answered that question. I don't think the OP asked about how to use those numbers, just are they real. btw: Colorado does release actual sales prices to the public, so I thought they were real. I know Houston does not do that, at least not a few years ago. They only release public appraisal records. So, I thought Zillow uses appraiser databases in Houston; whereas in Boulder, they use a public sales database
My mother-in-law is a realtor in DFW. She hates Zillow because the sales figures are not accurate and many clients will argue with her based upon what Zillow says and what she says, which comes straight from MLS. According to her, the numbers from Zillow do come from the MLS listings, but they are outdated by at least a week based on the terms of the contract between MLS and Zillow.
Thank you heypartner! and to the guy that got his taxes lowered.. how did you do it? my property surged which is great if I was selling but since I am not selling I would like to lower my taxes as well. What did you say in the protest that convinced them to lower. thanks
a realtor friend of ours recommended using Redfin.com over zillow. She says that zillow and trulia are always out of date and inaccurate.
Out of curiosity (since I just got my HCAD crap in the mail), I checked zillow to see how it compares to HCAD. Zillow is $3K less than the market value as shown by HCAD and $8K higher than the appraised value. So...zillow isn't too far off on my house.
why? So, she is saying we should use her, instead? Sounds like the opinion might have ulterior motives. I'll say again,,,Colorado publishes actual Sales prices for houses with dates. And Zillow reportedly pulls their numbers from that public database. If true, how can that not be very useful for doing pricing research. And yeah, so that would be major competition to the Realtor database (the MLS listings). Historically, realtors don't want you to see those numbers. I think you guys are confusing Houston's Zillow data. That is from the Harris County appraisal districts database (at least last time I checked), because Houston wants to keep sales prices secrets, and you have to have an account to login to the MLS system to see the historical sales numbers of a house. So, in Colorado. Zillow data = MLS data. At least it is supposed to. That's the question I'm interested in someone answering.
So basically what I am hearing is to use Zillow as a negotiating ploy when buying and not to use Zillow when selling.
Zillow's data in other states might be more accurate with sales data being public. I don't recommend it for Texas. But, even for Colorado, they have an algorithm to model a market price for houses that have not been on the market in a long time based on data of its location, size, condition, amenities, etc. If their data integrity on these characteristics are anything like HCAD's, I have to wonder how good their analytics can really be. To heyp's question, I bought my house 6 months ago and did not report the sales price to HCAD. They've moved the curve up since the purchase, but still off 10%. My HCAD appraisal for 2015 is still pending, so I imagine they've taken the 2014 HCAD number and applied some math to it.
