There’s always something to howl about.
Right there in the Realtor’s remarks section of the listing is the conversation-stopper, the quill-puller, the objection-obliterator:
The stately home you’ve always dreamed of with a completely unzillowable view…
That’s a mean meme, mama. If it spreads, the deal is utterly undone. The concept focuses the mind, and the word calls forth the concept. The coin Sellsius&176; has struck enriches us all…
Technorati Tags: blogging, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
This, possibly, which is just as useful and just as suspect as Dr. Jay Butler’s undocumented statistics. We arrive at the level of actuarial science, at best, which is what an automated valuation method is. An actuary can tell you the anticipated death rate of a specific sub-population. He cannot predict the day and hour of your death. Zillow.com knows almost nothing of importance about particular houses, so it can tell you almost nothing of importance about those particular houses.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, disintermediation, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
I saw the word “unzillowable” in this post by Sellsius&176; blog. I thought, that’s a great coinage. I should cite that. Life intruded, but Sellsius&176; is back today with a much fuller detailing of unzillowables:
That’s a buckeful, but surely there are more. Go thither and addend.
More zillification here: The real secret behind Zillow’s popularity.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
David G. from Zillow.com replied to my post yesterday which argues that Zillow.com Zestimates are bunk, which I had proved to my own satisfaction in an earlier post. I’m revisiting the topic — to everyone’s delight, no doubt — because I want to drive the point home, and because I want to illustrate how a business like Zillow.com could do a better job — which would nevertheless still fall short of Zillow.com’s fraudulent promises.
I’m going to draw from a few places. This is David G:
So, why is it inappropriate to comment on your “debunking Zillow” series? Well, frankly, I think you’re entitled to your opinion and I respect it. I may disagree with you; but how does saying that help this conversation?
I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone could reason rigorously about the argument I made and yet disagree with it. You cannot evaluate a house without seeing it. That seems to me to be beyond dispute. I’d be amazed if Zillow.com were to admit it, but they cannot deny it.
There’s more here, of course. No one with any sense at Zillow.com would buy or sell a home without a professional opinion of value.
But give the man credit. He doesn’t deny the truth. He just doesn’t quite admit it:
In many respects, I actually agree with you; Zillow does not replace visiting a house and its comps or a strong knowledge of the local market.
On the other hand, take a look at these promises, made on Zillow.com’s home page:
What is Zillow promising if not “knowledge” of the values of homes it has never seen?
Do you think this is ambiguous? This is from the Zillow.com “About Us” page:
Why not help consumers by giving them access to the same kinds of information and tools agents use?
Do you get the impression that what is meant here is “visiting a house and its comps or a strong knowledge of the local market”? I don’t.
David G. again:
Also, I find your argument applies equally to any AVM.
AVM is Automated Valuation Model. And David is 100% correct. All AVMs are equally fraudulent if they claim to Read more
I wrote Debunking Zillow.com on July 25th, two weeks ago today. Without being arcane or technical, I think it completely demolishes the idea that Zillow.com can — or ever can — provide reliable home values. Nathan Hughes at Richmond Business and Commercial News wrote about my post, and, in a comment there, I said:
The Zillow mystique is analogous to the aura that surrounds the nutritional supplements business. No one can possibly confuse a clerk in a GNC store for a physician, but people like the idea of being liberated from the dictates of their doctor while going one up on him at the same time.
We know that Zillow.com rides the Cluetrain, or seems to. When I teased them, they teased back.
Why, then, have they not responded to the much more serious allegation that their base epistemology categorically forbids the very results they promise to deliver? I believe that what Zillow.com does would be actionable professional malfeasance if done by a real estate licensee. If the owners of Zillow.com think I am wrong on one or both points, why haven’t they risen to answer my charges? If they can prove me wrong, why haven’t they done it?
Google me this. Or this. If I am wrong, they need to shout me down right now.
But I’m not wrong, am I? Cum tacent, clamant. Their silence speaks louder than any words: Zillow.com is bunk.
It is the duty of the entire real estate community — and in this company I include the recent dot.com entrants, licensed and unlicensed — to guard consumers from hoaxers, con-men and frauds. I have no doubt that the owners of Zillow.com have the best of intentions. Nevertheless the results they produce are necessarily erroneous — and I have zero doubts that they know it. I think this is a case where everyone who cares about the true value of homes — or simply The Truth in the abstract — should stand up and be counted.
The fact is, if you eat whole bottlesful of the quack nostrums they sell at GNC, nothing will happen to you. The contents are completely inert, with Read more
I live in Safari, an exceptionally adept tabbed web browser. In consequence, I can pile up page after page of stuff, each crammed with semi-organized tabs, that I intend to deal with later. Well, fast is the new slow and later is now — at least for the moment.
How will the TruZillia APIs make money? Volume! Baron Briefs has a richer answer:
My initial thought on why each would do this: By opening up Zestimates and Zindices to the masses, Zillow is following in the foot steps of major players like Amazon and Google…build an API, let others innovate off the technology, and then acquire the best of breed. Remember, they recently picked up an extra $25 million to “broaden their product offering”. As far as TruliaMap, it’s likely an attempt to win over agents and brokers who haven’t warmed up to the idea of their website being crawled and scraped. Now, they get a cool widget for their website and Trulia gets access to more listings.
Galen Ward at Rain City Guide has more, including sightings of the Great Kong, the 900 pound gorilla that is Google. And: Will brokers embrace Trulia’s maps?:
In other news, Trulia is now letting you post their listings on your site. They say it’s for agents and brokers, but do agents and brokers really want to steer people away from their web sites? If a visitor clicks on More details… they are whisked to the listing agent’s website. I predict that it will mostly be used by bloggers and non-real estate people.
The Real Estate Newsblog takes exception, sotto voce, to to my criticisms of Zillow.com’s epistemology:
I guess a significant problem for Zillow at the moment is credibility. Some suggest that Zillow’s “Zestimates” are way off base, but since they’re still in beta, it’s probably slightly premature to be overly critical at this point, notwithstanding the near $60 million they’ve got in seed money.
In fact, for the reason I named, Zillow.com cannot ever produce a reliable evaluation of a house. This is not a matter of refinement, it’s a fundamental defect in the epistemological model they’re working from. Read more
Color me grateful, but one benefit of the Trulia/Zillow free APIs for Realtor web sites is that we should see the end of the sleazy practice of making dewy-eyed anonymous-by-preference Google-borne immigrants fill out a form to search the MLS listings.
This crap is straight out of Dan Gooder, but, just as less is more, Gooder is worse. Acolytes of The Church of Seth know better. Interruption marketing (what Trulia and Zillow plan to do) is bad, but hostage-taking is insufferable.
It’s strictly a matter of serendipity that Seth Godin has the same first name as Cain and Abel’s other brother, but here is a Golden Rule more precious than gold itself: If the tables were turned, how would you want to be treated? If you — out of curiosity or because you want to invest in another town or because you want to move your widowed mother into a better neighborhood — visit another Realtor’s web site, do you want to surrender your personal details just to surf the local MLS? If not, then why would you do this to your own potential clients?
Luckily for the rest of us, we probably won’t have to wait for the Gooderites to discover a better morality. The TruZillow sites will be free — as Stewart Brand always wanted them to be — and the sites that continue to cower behind Berlin Wall-like contact-info forms will be neglected.
And — it just occurs to me — the Truliactive and Zillowized sites will probably be linked from Trulia.com and Zillow.com, which has SEO implications. And now I’m interested…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, disintermediation, real estate disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
Zillow.com cannot tell the truth about home values, so it is releasing an Application Programmer Interface to spread its misinformation far and wide.
Who do they hope to enlist with their API? Working Realtors, the people who know best that Zillow.com’s property evaluations are necessarily and unavoidably false.
Could the strategy work? Hide and watch.
Here’s a better question: Could this be the fifth column of a triumphalist Web 2.0, where obvious falsehoods are so widely propagated as to be accepted as truth?
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
Zillow.com got itself a ton of new venture capital yesterday, so today seems like a fine time to deconstruct its praxis.
When Zillow was brand new, Catherine Reagor, the dippy local real estate reporter for the Arizona Republic wrote:
Want a reality check? Go to zillow.com, a new Web site with a program that calculates a home’s value for free. It values several Valley homes for tens of thousands less than the price listed on them.
At the time, I said this in response:
If you want to know what your house is worth, do not go to Zillow.com, which delivers completely useless estimates of value for free. Even Net Value Central, a tool used by professionals, lags the market by a month or more. The only way to price a house is to work as rigorously as possible from current and recently-sold listings for extremely similar properties. If you price your house to sell from sources like zillow.com, you will give thousands of dollars away. If you rely on zillow.com to tell you how much to offer on a home, you will see it sold to someone else.
(You can prove all this to your own satisfaction, if you like. Most of Ms. Reagor’s mistakes seem to come from falling in love with ideas she doesn’t check out. Here she tells us that she ran Zillow.com on live listings and found it came in much lower than the listed prices. How did it do against sold listings? She didn’t check, but you can. Run Zillow.com on the sold homes documented in your local section of the Republic. You’ll see that, time after time, Zillow.com is substantially under real-life market results. It’s a useless toy, which Ms. Reagor might have discovered on her own had she bothered to test it properly.)
Just lately, I needled the Zillowites a little more:
All right, here’s the deal with Zillow.com:
I decide I’m going to buy you a pair of designer jeans, nothing but the best for you. I know that fit is important, so I go to three of your best friends to get their sizes. Not yours, theirs. I strike Read more
All right, here’s the deal with Zillow.com:
I decide I’m going to buy you a pair of designer jeans, nothing but the best for you. I know that fit is important, so I go to three of your best friends to get their sizes. Not yours, theirs. I strike a happy medium amidst the diversity, reckoning that — what the heck! — you can’t be that different from your friends.
If the jeans I buy for you actually happen to fit, this will be a happy accident. More likely, the jeans will be a close but not perfect fit.
You understand why, of course. Epistemological error was built into my sizing algorithm. I chose a method that might have been convenient, but which cannot possibly produce objectively accurate results with any degree of confidence. Arguably, the more of your friends I measure, the smaller my margin of error. But I am still pursuing an inherently erroneous sizing methodology.
For Realtors, a perusal of the tax records, the equivalent of a Zillow Zestimate, is the first step in comping, the step known to be least accurate. The next step is comping the house one-for-one with recent past sales and currently-marketed (competitive) listings. The last step is working all those numbers against the subject property in its current state of upkeep and upgrades.
In the same way, if I don’t take a tape rule to your inseam, the chances of my getting jeans that fit your unique physique are very poor.
However: In email, my friend and client Richard Nikoley set me straight on the value of Zillow.com:
I still think it can be used as a valuable tool for getting an idea of the relative values between neighborhoods in places you’ve never been to. Of course, once you determine where you want to buy, based on a number of factors and Zillow being only one input, then you need to begin the real homework.
Plus which, it’s fun to play with. It would be even more fun in Safari.
The map to the right is a Zillow heat map for Greater Phoenix, reflecting not the ambient temperature (115!) but the (approximate!) Read more
From RealEstateJournal.com:
After getting five estimates — four from online sites, and one from a professional appraiser who inspected the home in person. We were told the home might sell for anywhere from $291,000 to $375,000 — an $84,000, or 29%, spread.
The appraiser is probably closest to the mark, of course. Completely automated systems like Zillow.com can be accurate by accident, much as a gift-buyer might be accurate buying you clothes using measurements obtained from your friends. In many cases, I can tell practically to the dollar what a home will sell for. Other homes defy prediction. Certainty is never hard to find, though. If you want to know what your house is worth, sell it. The home’s value is what you got for it. Everything else is just a guess, no matter how well educated.
