How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M • Hacker News Board

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#331

Post by baq » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #260

dijonman2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very difficult to evict folks in Colorado, according to someone I know who buys and rents homes for a living. I think most landlords are pro tenant until they find someone who knows how to work the system. It costs them so much that they are skiddish to all renters.

Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their personal pains here, but I don't believe "pro tenant" has a useful meaning except in a context where you need to support them in opposition to some force or entity. And that entity is landlords.

If there’s return, there’s risk. All markets are adversarial.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#332

Post by mym1990 » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

cuteboy19 wrote: post #268

ramesh31 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does it physically destroy neighborhoods or just your perception of it? Yes, it does. People buy homes for more than financial reasons. Living in a community of homeowners with neighbors you've known for years is a completely different experience than living in a revolving door community of renters. There's been a whole decade of news reports about Airbnb ruining neighborhoods and condo buildings, to the point that…

So we should criminalize perfectly harmless things because it ruins your experience? It doesn't seem logical

It can't be perfectly harmless if it is ruining someone's experience. Its kind of like urinating in public...maybe it doesn't hurt anyone but it sure does ruin a lot of people's experience...and thus it is criminalized.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#333

Post by rdtwo » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #192

cuteboy19 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would have fixed much of this, it's point blank illegal to run a bed and breakfast out of your home. Why? It's your home, you can do anything in it. Why should you need a license to rent out your own home for a few days? Does it physically destroy neighborhoods or just your perception of it? If so, why should anyone care?

Because it's the law. Whether or not you agree with the law is irrelevant.

The law only applies to poor people. Rich people can and do ignore laws all the time. When corporations get involved they can just bully around all the local municipalities with size

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#334

Post by registeredcorn » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:44 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #243

registeredcorn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason I don't understand. Why aren't landlords able to do this? Isn't it seen as immoral to steal property from an owner?

Because it's not just someone's property, it's also someone's home. The place they live. Society has collectively deemed kicking someone out of their home with no notice to be undesirable, even if they are currently struggling to pay rent. You have to keep in mind the vast majority of tenancies are in good faith.

True. I was reexamining the way I worded my question and I certainly could have put things better. There is more nuance there than I had given at first thought.

Having grown up in rentals, and having had close family member kicked out of a rental with something like 1 weeks notice, I am very conflicted over the issue. Thank you for not responding in kind to the way my question was worded.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#335

Post by vkou » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:44 PM UTC

programmarchy wrote: post #256

MiroF wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to control who lives next to you, feel free to buy the neighboring properties.

Thankfully, I don't live in ancapistan, so I can vote instead.

Yes, and by voting the way that you do, you are creating a housing crisis.

I'd like for people expressing these political preferences to not be allowed to live in my neighbourhood either, but unlike you, I also recognize that you have as much right to live there as those 8 college students.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#336

Post by jjav » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

MiroF wrote: post #143

Teknoman117 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone can move in and refuse to pay rent, refuse to leave, use your house as a drug den, destroy your property and lots more, and you can do nothing about it. This is one of those things that really just confuses me. It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". And to whoever downvoted yo…

> It's like no one could agree on happy medium between "landlord can eject you whenever they want for whatever reason" and "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason". No place in the US actually has the latter unless you've been letting them squat for half a decade or something, the issue is court delays and landlord's wanting to make their lot out to be worse than it is.

> > "no one can make you leave, ever, for any reason".

> No place in the US actually has the latter

Not technically, no. But there are areas (e.g. San Francisco) where getting a non-paying tenant out is close enough to impossible that it might as well be.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#337

Post by TimPC » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

buzzdenver wrote: post #10

The author has a valid point in that the information asymmetry will attract sellers whose property is overvalued to sell to Zillow. I suspect though that something different happened in reality. I live in a 70 unit condo building, so there are a lot of very good comparables. Zillow bought one of the units about 10% over market value, which makes me think that they're doing some sort of market manipulation, like charg…

It’s very hard to do good real estate pricing models from raw data. You can get all sorts of metrics on the property statistics but one important factor in the cost of the home is the state of renovation. Since most listings don’t have a historical listing of work done in the home your best hope of accurately assessing this comes from something like computer vision on the listing pictures. Assessing the quality of work, recency of work, quality of materials and factoring that into a house price is extremely hard. It would not surprise me at all if Zillow paid near market value for a whole bunch of dated homes that hadn’t kept up with the times and would sell for below the market of similar homes in the neighborhood according to typical metrics. The stories make it seem like their model had even more issues than that. Still I’m surprised anyone actually tried this idea given how poor the algorithms are and how obvious it is that key data points are not available.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#338

Post by alecbz » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

> Here’s the problem: my autodraft team ended up with a roster almost exclusively stocked with the players idiosyncratically overrated by Yahoo!. For example, an older player whose younger backup had just earned praise from the coach, suggesting that he might be about to lose his job.

I guess this is pretty obvious but just to be explicit, what's happening I guess is that players that are "correctly" valued by the algorithm are getting taken by others, and only the overvalued ones are left for the algorithm to choose.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#339

Post by cloutchaser » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

How did opendoor manage to do the same thing better? The article seems like a takedown of the model, but opendoor managed to do the same thing profitably.

From what I've read it seems Zillow never had the actual expertise to do this, they were always a house price checking site. On the other hand opendoor started out doing this from the start.

Re: How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

#340

Post by jjav » Fri, Mar 18, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #260

dijonman2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very difficult to evict folks in Colorado, according to someone I know who buys and rents homes for a living. I think most landlords are pro tenant until they find someone who knows how to work the system. It costs them so much that they are skiddish to all renters.

Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their personal pains here, but I don't believe "pro tenant" has a useful meaning except in a context where you need to support them in opposition to some force or entity. And that entity is landlords.

> Landlords have chosen to enter an inherently adversarial relationship with the goal of profiting from the other party.

There isn't any reason for it to be adversarial, it's certainly not inherently so. Only if one or both sides want to make it adversarial.

It is supposed to be a win-win scenario. Some people prefer to rent instead of buying, so they need a supply of rentals and the owner needs someone to live there so it doesn't sit empty costing them money.

Fortunately I've never had one of the adversarial landlords. I paid them on time and took good care of the property and in exchange they have been super flexible and let me do whatever I want. That's a win-win.