Got Zestimates?
Ever wonder how much your house is worth? Not too long ago, you only had a couple ways to find out how much your home was worth:
- Pay an appraiser to get assign a value to your home, which costs several hundred dollars.
- Wait for a similar home to go on sale in your neighborhood, then try to find out the price. Unreliable.
- Ask a real estate agent for a free appraisal. Do you want an agent contacting you all the time, especially if you’re not planning to sell your house?
- Sell your house (using an agent). You’ll find out for sure.
But for those that don’t want to sell their house just to find out how much it is worth, several online tools have popped up in the ‘recent’ future to value your home. Zillow is one of those sites, and probably the most popular.
Zillow provides ‘Zestimates’ for millions of homes across the country (if you live in a non-disclosure state or locality, though, you won’t be able to zestimate your home’s value). Zillow pulls publically available data on your home and others in your area and runs them through their proprietary algorithm to zestimate your home’s value. If you’re not happy with your zestimate, and the public data is incorrect or incomplete, you can claim your home and update the property information, which will recalculate your zestimate. For example, if you put an an addition this summer, you can add that information into zillow to recalculate the zestimate. Hopefully, your zestimate increases!
Zillow is a fun tool, but a word of caution: I would never buy or sell a home based on the zestimate alone. It’s truly an estimate, and Zillow cannot see inside your home to view the condition, nor that of your neighbors (and your home is valued partly on how much your neighbors’ homes are worth).
