Why do online property estimators produce such wildly different results?
 

Curious what our home's value might be now that we've been in it for 18 months, I looked it up on zillow and redfin, and there's a $61,000 dollar difference in the two estimates! WTF?

And I'm not talking about the difference between a $1,520,000 estimate and a $1,581,000 estimate. we're
in a WAAAAAY lower bracket; $61,000 represents a very significant percentage of our home's overall value.

Don't these online calculators have the same access to all the same info - recent comps, last sale price, tax assessment info, etc.? How can the estimates be so wildly different only 18 months after a sale? Someone is way off the mark here.

Obviously, I want to believe the estimate that's $61,000 higher, but it all seems like a big farce now.

It's because it's an online estimate with different sites using different algorithms.

Take with a grain of salt.

A true, professional appraisal is all that matters

Of course, but I'm not gonna pay for a pro appraisal just for my own shits and giggles.

I was expecting the online "rough" estimates to be a lot closer than 61 fucking thousand dollars. I mean, we just bought the place a year and a half ago, giving it a very solid recent sale price to start from, it's not like they're taking shots in the dark on a home that hasn't been on the market for 3 decades.

Something just doesn't seem to add up here. I checked our upstairs neighbors who bought their place a year before us and their two estimates are within $4,000. That to me seems way more within a reasonable margin of error.

Because people are way too high on ML :)

I used to do BPOs for banks so obviously something is off.

My experience is you can narrow down the estimates by giving the sites more info that may not be available to them. Article in the WSJ today made the point that a number of states including (I checked—Illinois isn’t one of these states) Texas don’t even require public disclosure of the prices of actual sales. Then there are factors like you say your place was gut rehabbed—so how old is the roof, the major equipment like HVAC, water heater etc. Do you have anything of unusual quality like flooring etc. Since all the online sites have to go on is last sales price, square footage comps, number of rooms and other large scale factors—nobody has visited the property after all—they can make wildly varying assumptions. But most of the sites—Zillow certainly does—allow owners to supply missing details and granular facts that can replace assumptions.

Here’s the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sta...s&page=1&pos=1

These real estate/rental apps are a joke, that's why.

Our house shows a $20k discrepancy between Redfin and Zillow and our rental house is off about $10k. The Zillow value is more or less close to what the house across from us just sold for, similar size and layout.

Ok, so this nonsense gets even more absurdly insane.

I checked out our home's value on 5 other estimator sites, in addition to zillow and redfin. Here's the full list:

Zillow
Redfin
Trulia
Realtor.com
Eppraisals
Chase
Remax

Eppraisals was the highest and Remax was the lowest, with a total dollar spread of $213,000 between the two estimates!

Again, W? T? F?

How can some of these algorithms be SO way off the mark? Our place just sold 18 months ago, and Chicago's real estate market is not dynamic enough to see radical property value swings positive or negative over such a short time period.

The redfin estimate was the median value, and seems plausible from what I know of the local market, I guess I'll go with that one. The crazy high zillow zesstimate didn't really pass the sniff test anyway. There's no effing way our home has appreciated $130K in a year and a half. maybe shit like that happens in california, but this is the midwest we're talking about.