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[ScrapHappy]

Every once in a while, I check what Zillow has as to the value of our house.  Of course, I like it much better when it's more than what we purchased it for than below.  But, what I don't understand is when I look at the rest of the homes on my street.  Two homes in particular have always gone up, never down (that I've seen) and it's not by a little amount...it's more like $200,000.  The house next door to us was always less than ours, and now it's over $100,000.  Mine seems to stay pretty much the same or less.  The houses that I gave examples to all moved in around when we did.  Just wondering.

[proudlyfromNJ]

I don't think it's accurate at all.

[nyc1]

There was news about this very subject about 2 or 3 months ago, claiming the prices were bogus.  Zillow said they were working to be more on target.  I personally have no idea either way.   How would they know if you've made improvements and updated your home both inside and even out?  I'm guessing that it's the basic model, size, location and area average that makes up the price listed.   I wouldn't bank on it either way.

[MissMaggieMoo]

@ScrapHappy I work in the real estate industry and Zillow and Trulia are very unreliable sources. As a matter of fact, LandWatch.com dropped both of these real estate posting sites from their portofolio back in January due to all the inaccurate information on both sites. LandWatch is one of the top listing sites for posting properties for sale and auctions.

[granddi]

We sold our house in 2 days by listing on Zillow. This saved the both the buyer and seller significant money.

When searching we found Zillow very helpful in getting a "range" of price per square foot. In the area that we bought we felt like it gave us a good starting point. 

[Mothertrucker]

I have a lot of friends who are realtors, and they don’t think it’s very accurate in most cases

[novamc1]

@ScrapHappy

Sites such as Zillow are not based on information gathered for each house by an actual person, who would be keeping track , on a continually updated basis, of details about properties and transactions.

Right now, Zillow says the house I sold over a year ago is still there.  The photo of my old house is all over the internet when I enter the address. 

It's not  there at all.  After I sold it, the custom home builder/ purchaser tore it down and replaced it with a newly built home that sold a few months ago for almost three times the price of what I sold.   I sold the house for the value of the land only, because that is where all the value resided.  It was a beautiful, well-built house in great cosmetic shape with some basic outdated systems that could never be fixed without tearing it down and starting from scratch.

During the year or so that he was building the new home and was advertising the new home as "coming soon", the real estate sites were quoting the price he was asking but were including the square footage, number of bedrooms/ baths, etc. of MY house.  I'm sure people were wondering how he could be asking almost $3 million for a house the size of mine.  That's how NOT reliable the data can be.

 (I just googled my old address and sure enough, the old homestead is still all over the internet.  I'm dying to see some photos of  the new one that sits in its place, but no luck so far.  The internet photos are so old that they don't even show the newer lamppost we installed about four years ago,  and some shrubs we took out of the front yard long ago are still showing.)

Zillow and similar sites are based on software and algorithms that "mechanically" pull a whole bunch of data from many different sources, and often wind up with a false conclusion about MANY things.

I used to get a kick out of looking at this type of real estate site, some of which would even go so far as to list the closest bars to get a drink  I never heard of or saw the so-called closest bar that was listed for my property, and I certainly wouldn't have trekked my kids to the schools that reportedly served my property.  A few were in the next county!  

As for Realtor.com, the info and data for each house on that site is automatically  pulled directly from each locality's multiple listing system, and it draws no conclusions from anything other than  facts contained in each property listing or public records.  It is the most accurate site of any because of that.

[ALRATIBA]

Every so often, I use Zillow to check on houses that I owned in my past life.  

The next to the last one that we owned in the late 1980s was "flipped" recently .... but there were no inside pics.   The way the entry was worded, the "flippers" appear to be well-known in that area.

[tansy]

I think it depends on what type of home is being evaluated and the neighborhood the home’s in.  In my case it’s pretty accurate.  

[PINKdogWOOD]

What I like especially about both zillow & trulia is that you can peruse the homes in areas (away from you) you may be interested in and/or in your area. From what I've seen for sale around me price-wise and what's posted on these sites is pretty accurate.