How reliable are Zillow data?

Question

I am searching rental properties and realized zillow provides rental estimates and prediction of home values in the next year, etc.

not sure how reliable are these info. Did Anyone reference those data when buying and share the experience? Of course I will need much more info but wonder if it is a good start to rely on these data.

Chris Mason · Answer

Zillow is trash data. CEO of Zillow sold his own personal home for 40% under the Zillow number. It was in the news if you want to google it.

ALL "automated valuation model" numbers are trash data. That's why we have appraisers, who certainly aren't perfect, but are 100x better than any AVM that exists.

Daniel Kong · Answer

Its obviously not going to be exact, but its definitely a good starting point. Recently sold homes for instance, are actual homes that have sold for in the areas surrounding the property you are looking up. How Zillow calculates the actual Zestimate price of a property has a lot of holes in it. Instead of just taking the Zestimate, take a look at the house - how many beds/baths/sq feet, the condition, and try and compare it to recently sold houses in the same vicinity. That will give you a somewhat good idea of what it would be worth.

As far as rent - just because something is listed for rent at $1500, doesnt mean it actually will get rented out for that much. Just take that into account when doing your research (on Zillow, Rentometer, and Craigslist).

David de Luna · Answer

For rental estimates, I start with Rentometer when working numbers on properties (but I don't rely on Rentometer if I'm thinking I'll make an offer).

John Teachout · Answer

Like many data crunching apps, Zillow's data reliability depends a lot on what it's measuring. In our market, I've found the rental Zestimate to be fairly close. As far as home values, if there are lots of similar homes being sold, it's usually pretty close but sometimes way off. Many county websites or tax collecting authorities have available online data that can give you more specifics on a property and others in the neighborhood. Zillow or any similar website has no way of knowing the condition of the property in question, or what condition the comparables were. There's nothing like your own eyeballs and knowledge of the local market. I use Zillow all the time but not so much for numbers.

Andrew Syrios · Answer

From what I've seen that historic sales data is pretty good, but the Zestimate for both value and rent value should never be trusted. It's not a bad place to start to get a broad idea, but there are just too many local variables (not to mention property condition) for an algorithm to be trustworthy.

Hyun Don Yun · Answer

Thanks for all comments!

How reliable are Zillow data?

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