Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

stevenbuccini.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 386 posts

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#181

Post by abernard1 »

> Because when you have a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail and when you have TensorFlow, everything tends to look like an ML problem.

And if you have billions of dollars in cheap capital, everything looks like an investment problem.

Which is ultimately the suggestion of this article: "Why aren't you more like Wall Street?"

The implications are exactly the opposite of Zillow being an innovative company. If they require billions of dollars in deep pockets (nbd) and a restructuring of their org to be more like old-school operators, all signs point to existing players as more fundamentally correct about the strategy required to succeed in the space.

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#182

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #170
jason-phillips wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both local property taxes and property taxes from urban areas that are redistributed to rural communities by the state of Texas. San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students. They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of impor…

So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.

> So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them.

It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#184

Post by registeredcorn »

jason-phillips wrote: post #101
h2odragon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife did some work for the Census last year. Our extremely rural neighborhood has lots of unused housing, some for a decade+. That work got her out to see some of the places not visible from the roads, and increased our awareness of the scale of the problem. At a guess, in our county, 20%+ of the housing is idle, owned by out-of-state companies, some of whom pay property taxes and some dont. The county isn't aucti…

> I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem. I don't think I agree with this assessment. I live in a very rural area two hours northwest of Austin, literally in the middle of nowhere. I've studied the local economy and understand how things work here. I think the characteristics you've identified in the rural housing supply are not unusual and also not as serious in a pract…

I've noticed similar situations to this in my own area.

In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#185

Post by goldenkey »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #170
jason-phillips wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both local property taxes and property taxes from urban areas that are redistributed to rural communities by the state of Texas. San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students. They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of impor…

So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.

You'd be surprised at how progressive southern states are. The Texas state motto is literally "Friendship." Now, I don't know much about Texas but I did live in Arizona for a few years. It surprised me more than a bit, as someone who grew up in New York.

Arizona legalized medical marijuana quite early, followed by recreational marijuana. Their medicaid program AHCCCS [1] is extremely comprehensive and even pays for Uber/Lyft to the doctor's office and back. Patients are able to see a great selection of GPs and specialists, and the copay is always $0. The accompanying drug plan is comprehensive, also with a copay of $0. AHCCCS will approve expensive modern drugs like Rozeram (supercharged melatonin analog for sleep) if the sufficient documentation of reasonable need is provided.

Cactuses are protected from destruction by law, and must be transplanted when doing clearing for construction. You may find the idea of being able to own a firearm without a license to be unpalatable but the state largely remains very safe crime-wise (perhaps due to that?)

I miss living in Arizona. It's a beautiful state with very caring folk. I saw almost no homeless folks in Phoenix. Folks there seem to really care about their fellow citizens. Southern hospitality is for sure a thing, take it from a daft boy from Brooklyn!

[1] https://www.azahcccs.gov/

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#186

Post by lisper »

ricardobayes wrote: post #149
EMM_386 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I.e. the price per square foot might make a property look like a steal, while something like a sewer main nearby, or problematic neighbor This is the real problem. Even if they have the historical data for that exact house/unit, it won't help them in cases such as: * That nice view of the woods out the window is now blocked by a massive radio antenna that was just built there * The river running through the back ya…

anectodal evidence, but yes, an apartment I lived in was 30k cheaper than everything in the house, and the estimate. So I was really happy to have caught a bargain. Then after moving in it turned out the neighbors were unbearable. The father had developed a DIY habit during covid and he would regularly put together furniture at 11PM. Then they had two monsters for kids. Would literally jump around uncontrollably for…

You could sue your seller for failure to disclose.

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#187

Post by skohan »

loeg wrote: post #178
skohan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well as someone who lives in a fairly regulated housing market (Berlin) I'm happy about all the regulations you've mentioned as they prevent negative externalities which would benefit real-estate developers at the cost of everyone else. Imo targeting a specific population density is within the mandate of local government, as too-high density causes all sorts of issues from traffic to health and everything in between.…

You originally claimed that these regulations were for safety: > it's not as if building regulations have been developed for fun, it's largely in response to safety issues and so on. But they're not. As you (now) say, they're for reducing development. The original statement about safety was substantially incorrect.

Surely you can grasp that "and so on" implies other reasons than the one explicitly stated. Negative externalities are another example of a valid target of regulation.

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#188

Post by toast0 »

h2odragon wrote: post #68
_xnmw wrote: post #54

Good riddance. If large-scale house flipping took off, we might actually end up in a scenario where housing was treated as a speculative asset, with empty houses getting flipped between investors looking to make a quick buck, further lowering the supply of actual places to live (because housing units remain empty while being flipped), driving up the cost for families who just want a place to live. Oh wait...

My wife did some work for the Census last year. Our extremely rural neighborhood has lots of unused housing, some for a decade+. That work got her out to see some of the places not visible from the roads, and increased our awareness of the scale of the problem. At a guess, in our county, 20%+ of the housing is idle, owned by out-of-state companies, some of whom pay property taxes and some dont. The county isn't aucti…

> The county isn't auctioning off because of tax default anymore, no one was buying these places at $100.

What's the issue with out of state companies owning rural properties nobody wants? If the market is heating up, maybe it's time to run tax auctions again.

In WA state, if there's no bidders, the county retains the land and will auction it again when someone expresses interest (or it some cases, can sell it to a neighboring land holder without auction, like for the 1930s era tax foreclosure I bought last year)

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#189

Post by silvestrov »

sokoloff wrote: post #106
silvestrov wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite: there is not much valuable data, it is just noise. It is very difficult to go from what users browse to what they actually buy. People very often say one thing, then do something completely different. And sometimes they browse stuff just to make sure that their current decision is correct, so they will look at a lot of items they're not going to buy. (oh, and everybody and their mother knows pho…

Do you think that A/B or multi-variate testing works in general?

In some cases A/B testing works very well and in other cases not at all.

So it is easy to test UI changes, but difficult to find out why people do what the do.

Re: Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

#190

Post by SteveGerencser »

h2odragon wrote: post #134
jason-phillips wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually used to work with people from East Tennessee for the past 2.5 years. They described how the Knoxville area was growing like crazy with folks from the coastal states moving there. I understand what you're saying. The ripple effect created by that dynamic would unjustifiably inflate local property values, reducing affordability for locals, creating synthetic demand by reducing supply as the land could otherw…

West TN; we've got that happening too. The neighbor's $750k McMansion has ludicrous "market value" implications for the hunting camp trailers beside it and the doublewide up the road. and (ahem) East TN is more "western Arlington VA" IMO. I said rural . I'd have to walk a half mile to get a decent rifle shot at a neighbor. It's getting too crowded here.

You just described my road here in Henderson County,TN. We bought 100 acres and built a dream home. In the last years (ish) 4 new single wides went in and a couple of new smaller homes. We were told during the entire build that we will never get out of it what we are putting into it and we don't care. We aren't building for resale, selling it is our kid's problem.

But there are so many abandoned places out here. People have just walked away and never looked back. We had one across the road that over the last 10 years the woods has reclaimed and unless you knew that it was there, you would drive right past it.

Post reply on HN