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

Post by rejschaap » Wed, May 10, 2017, 10:11 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #90

lotsofpulp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not correct, then the sale price will reflect that and Zillow's reputation will take a hit. Don't understand why the government needs to get involved in what someone says something is worth, it's their opinion and they're entitled to it. Edit: It would be funny if Zillow also started putting up alerts about problems with government finances which will likely impact future taxes, such as in Illinois.

It's still a price anchor. If an engineer at Zillow manipulated the Zestimate on a home they were trying to buy or sell, would they succeed in driving the price of the home in the desired direction? I think so. Clearly real estate agents have the same feeling or they wouldn't be suing.

Post by mcguire » Wed, May 10, 2017, 10:17 PM UTC

wuliwong wrote: post #74

LoSboccacc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this should be. it's a market with few sales at high costs heavily interwinded with the mortgage market. having a de facto monopoly on what's considered a fair value, rightly or wrongly, opens up bank people and real estate agents to all kind of manipulation. by manipulating their equation they can help lowball the sales price of an entire area, they can both profit directly out of this, indirectly through stock mani…

But how does getting an appraisal license protect bank people and real estate agents? Isn't an appraiser subject to the same moral shortcomings as any regular person? And only allowing state licensed appraisers to give value estimates does exactly what you are trying to avoid. It creates a state owned monopoly on housing estimates. Zillow would lose credibility and it would hurt the core of their business if it was f…

Post by mannykannot » Wed, May 10, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

_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…

Post by rockinghigh » Wed, May 10, 2017, 10:31 PM UTC

mattkrause wrote: post #25

_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…

If you want to try it, there are a few data sets kicking around, including a) https://www.kaggle.com/c/house-prices-advanced-regression-te... b) http://www.bis.org/statistics/pp_detailed.htm c) https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/housing If you had a really great model, you might be able to make some money with it--find underpriced (per the model) houses, buy them, and then try to sell them at the model's price.

Post by leftandright » Wed, May 10, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #48

natoliniak wrote: post #4

Interesting. I wonder what would her argument be if Zillow simply reported the City/County tax assessors estimates which are usually even lower than Zillow's.

>I wonder what would her argument be if Zillow simply reported the City/County tax assessors estimates which are usually even lower than Zillow's. County assessors for tax purposes are explicitly not trying to determine market price. Zillow should ignore it.