One thing that really irks me are these online valuation tools. Zillow is one of those. The thing that really irritates me is that they are often extremely inaccurate.

I did little test, I took the subdivision ‘Hobble Creek’ in West Boise which has a wide range of home pricing and quite a bit of sales history. it’s a good size subdivision with plenty of data in which to run analysis on. What I found is that an average Zillow was 22% off, as you can see by this chart. This is the average sales price for the past four months in this neighborhood, we can see the sales price and then the so called Zestimate and how much they were off from the actual sales price. In one case as much as 85% but a lot of them are in the 20 - 30 % range.

The reason why Zillow’s online valuation models are so inaccurate, in our area, is because we don’t have any required transfer tax like other states do. What that means is that the Sold data is not a public record so really all they can use is the tax information.

Tax data in the tax valuation is 6 - 12 months old and it’s really based on the what’s called the Mass Appraisal Technique which is quite different than valuing your own property.

So if you are looking at selling or looking at buying, please call a real estate professional. I hope you call me and we can get you a much more accurate number on what we can sell your property for in today’s market place.