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Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

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Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#101

Post by e15ctr0n »

cwkoss wrote: post #84
mbroshi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from the article: "...the fact that they offer market-value estimates and 'are promoted as a tool for potential buyers to use in assessing [the] market value of a given property,' shows that they meet the definition of an appraisal under state law. Not only should Zillow be licensed to perform appraisals before offering such estimates" It can be surprising when seemingly innocuous activities are in fact heavi…

Why did stanford have to take the videos down?

It wasn't Stanford, it was Berkeley.

UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

Berkeley Removes 20,000 Free Online Videos to Comply with DOJ Ruling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#103

Post by tehlike »

hehheh wrote: post #38
_m8fo wrote: post #16

You would think real estate would prove to be one of the few real life fields where machine learning would be able to predict the prices pretty accurately. You have: 1. List price 2. "Favorites" on the MLS. 3. Square footage 4. Bedrooms 5. Bathrooms 6. Sold price for nearby properties 7. Sold price for nearby properties relative to their list price And the list goes on... Is it that difficult to predict? Literally th…

There's plenty of money in it. Imagine if you could price the house correctly out of the gate, reducing the amount of time the home stays on the market. It is indeed a hard problem to solve using ML. You'd need a few other things: 8. Floor count 9. Size and location of the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen 10. In-unit laundry (mostly for condos) 11. Proximity to neighbors 12. Existing tree coverage and other landscaping 1…

Opendoor does exactly this?

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#104

Post by EpicEng »

wuliwong wrote: post #60
malandrew wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also non-tangibles like knowing your buyer and how much you can get from them. My mother passed away last year and I handled the home sale as I was the executor of the estate. The buyer was a neighbor who heard about my mother passing away and saw it as an opportunity to buy the house for so his mother could live less than 100 meters from him and help him and his wife with raising their kids. He knew we'd b…

Usually this is mitigated by the appraisal. Lenders generally aren't willing lending more than a home is appraised for because of the increased risk. I'm sure this varies from state to state but I think this holds mostly true in general. That being said, the appraisals themselves are quite subjective and only based off a few similar properties sold recently, so I still agree it's a difficult problem.

Appraisals magically come in at the exact offer price unless the offer is just completely off the charts insane. Appraisals are often times BS or, at best, just whatever you need them to be within some rather large margin (+/- 10%? 20%?).

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#105

Post by tehlike »

narrowrail wrote: post #63

As long as there are already many anecdotes, I'll just add mine (I've always taken the zestimate as Zillow's working model that probably needs lots of tweaking; it's not like the MLS's are eager to give them data). Anecdote: My folks live in a golf course neighborhood where their house is not on the course, and it's smaller than the rest. However, my folks house is valued based on these extravagant golf-course side p…

In bay area it can go up to 150k for a 2.5m$ house. Split two ways.

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#106

Post by WillPostForFood »

wuliwong wrote: post #94
cwkoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did stanford have to take the videos down?

It doesn't look like the did. At least not the ML course https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229/47 Still has that blistering audio though, wish somebody would regulate that to a lower volume. :)

OP may have confused Stanford with Berkeley, which was forced to remove thousands of videos because they weren't captioned for the hearing impaired.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#108

Post by yellow_postit »

strictnein wrote: post #49
mr_tristan wrote: post #44

You can find estimate calculators from various banks, realtors, etc. I just did a basic google search and checked out estimates from Zillow, Chase, and RE/MAX, and they range from 4% under my home price to 11% over. That's a pretty crazy range of guesses. My question is: why aren't these other home estimate calculators subject to being sued, then? (And when I checked out Zillow, I noticed there was a direct link to "…

The "I disagree" button is a lead gen for realtors, not for you to give them feedback.

Is there evidence they do zero tracking of clicks on that link for model eval.? It seems much more likely it's a case of lead gen and feedback.

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#109

Post by mcguire »

mr_tristan wrote: post #44

You can find estimate calculators from various banks, realtors, etc. I just did a basic google search and checked out estimates from Zillow, Chase, and RE/MAX, and they range from 4% under my home price to 11% over. That's a pretty crazy range of guesses. My question is: why aren't these other home estimate calculators subject to being sued, then? (And when I checked out Zillow, I noticed there was a direct link to "…

'Hasn't been sued' != 'Won't be sued'.

Zillow is the most popular and have been pushing it in their advertising.

Re: Zillow faces lawsuit over ‘Zestimate’ tool that calculates a house’s worth

#110

Post by EpicEng »

_m8fo wrote: post #16

You would think real estate would prove to be one of the few real life fields where machine learning would be able to predict the prices pretty accurately. You have: 1. List price 2. "Favorites" on the MLS. 3. Square footage 4. Bedrooms 5. Bathrooms 6. Sold price for nearby properties 7. Sold price for nearby properties relative to their list price And the list goes on... Is it that difficult to predict? Literally th…

So many intangibles. People's emotions (on both sides) are one, but then you have the house with the nice kitchen, or that other house with a not-so-nice kitchen, but a flatter yard. And on and on.

Zillow uses plenty of ML, but what's their advertised accuracy? iirc it's something like within 20% 80% of the time?

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