Is Zillow Catfishing You?

“I know realtors don’t like it when we look at Zillow…”  To all the realtors saying that: it’s not your job to tell people what to do -- because guess what? They're going to do it anyway. If you want to stay relevant in the era of digital-first search, you need to understand what they are doing and figure out what that’s telling you about what they need.  Only then can you provide 21st century real estate advisory services that deliver on those needs in this environment.  

But, still, we get it. You may be wondering why we (realtors) get our panties in a bunch when our clients bow down to the Zillow gods and slurp up that zestimate click-bait.  Zillow (and its aggregator cousins like Realtor.com and Redfin) pulls a ton of publicly available data, including year-over-year appreciation, recently sold similar properties, quality of life scores, income levels (and much more!) from the interwebs and distills it down into that 1 number they call the home value. Easy, right? 

But think of it like this: does a home appraiser just log into their zillow account, look at the the zestimate of house they have been hired by a giant banking institution to appraise, and then find some similarly priced houses to support that number and call it a day? We hope not! If property appraisals were as easy as opening up Google chrome and typing in an address, lenders and banks and appraisers would be in big trouble. There are so many factors that go into a home valuation, so many seen and unseen elements that it takes a human to decipher.  When considering the validity of the zestimate you are seeing the robots spit out on your favorite porn  real estate site.  Ask yourself the following questions:

1. When was the last time this house sold? If the property hasn't turned over in a number of years, it is likely that a few things have happened: improvements have been made inside that you cannot see that will affect the value positively OR there has been deferred maintenance over those years that will negatively affective the value OR some combination of the 2 that need to be accounted for in the current value of the home. 
2. Is the demographic of your neighborhood, let alone your street, 100% homogenous? Like much of Pittsburgh and the surrounding near suburbs, home values vastly fluctuate block by block, or often, house by house.
3. What do the available photos of the property look like online?  The bots analyze ALL kinds of data, and at this stage, the quality of the photos and what the algorithms can "see" actually make a difference in the home's valuation.
4. How is or has the property been described in the captions on these sites? The use of descriptive and detailed language also can factor into the overall value (and it can be good OR bad).  Imagine a listing description depicting the following: 'this home boasts a chef's kitchen with marble countertops overlooking the great room with ample space to cook and entertain' vs. 'included in the home are a large kitchen and dining area...'. Same house. Which one will the algorithm value more favorably? 
5. Has the home been flipped? One of the pitfalls of number 4 is that flowery language and glossy pictures can, in fact, be misleading to the bots.  As one of our client's so sagely uttered to us, "no one likes it when a house catfishes you." 

So what's the moral of the story? We strongly believe and deeply know that home valuations are a multifaceted process that needs to take into account a ton of data that spans the divide between what is available purely on the internet and what a human being, whether it be your realtor, an appraiser or you, dear consumer can come to know and see with your own eyes.