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How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M

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

#361

Post by Otternonsenz »

buzzdenver wrote: post #355
TimPC wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

What was stopping Zillow from having a human look at the property and adjust the price based on factors that their algorithm didn't consider?

Nothing, but that would require them hiring an appraiser on each transaction, which would be humbling for them to have to do (and while biased as an appraiser myself, I would not trust anyone else other than a licensed appraiser to do that type of adjustment work, because it’s a daily part of our jobs).

Or they could have an internal team of appraisers doing that type of work, but the business might not like it when the appraisers don’t validate their pricing structure because real data does not support it.

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

#362

Post by phlowbieuq »

encoderer wrote: post #21

I was at Zillow for many years and left in 2020. On the tech side the pivot into iBuying was absolutely bonkers. The message from senior leadership was basically: I have no idea what your teams should be working on but it’s definitely not what they are currently working on so stop that and figure something else out. This has nothing directly to do with their market failure but they probably are driven by the same lea…

i wish we lived in the same area and could have an OTR conversation about this. believe it or not, the new "strategy" now that ZO is all shut down is even less well-defined and more pie-in-the-sky than ZO ever was.

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

#363

Post by Dylan16807 »

rdtwo wrote: post #304
MiroF wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not a liberal if you're casually violating fair housing law :) Everyone wants to call themselves a liberal or progressive nowadays, it's bizarre. These things are about actions, not self-assigned labels.

Liberals can break laws just like conservatives can. Free country

Sure they can!

But ongoing intent to break certain categories of law will also mean that certain political labels are incorrect.

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

#364

Post by giraffe_lady »

endisneigh wrote: post #352
giraffe_lady wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only things that are absolute needs. You can walk away from a profitable transaction, you can't walk away from one you'll die without. People are willing to take much more extreme action around housing (and food, medicine, ) than they are most other goods. They're also less likely to agree there is moral justification in profiting from these things. So even when entering these transactions (they must, after all), the…

Should doctors work for free? Should farmers?

Do landlords labor?

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

#365

Post by hammock »

bastawhiz wrote: post #6

I recently bought a home. We toured a Zillow home, and I can understand what they were going for and where they failed. We were able to pull up to the driveway, book a tour for that minute, and walk in the front door. It was almost a magical experience compared to the process of finding and going to showings. The listings were clear and thorough. The experience was extremely compelling. The downside: the homes were a…

Sounds nice. Where do you live?

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

#366

Post by Dylan16807 »

programmarchy wrote: post #120
KptMarchewa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>local regulations state that I am not allowed to live with more than 2 people unrelated to me What? Where is that? It sounds insane and extreme overreach. How can somebody regulate with whom consenting adults choose to live?

If you have a family home, you probably don’t want 8 college students moving into the house next door to you. This was a restriction in my college town. As a student, I didn’t like it, but as a homeowner with a family, I completely understand.

8 people in an entire house? I don't see the problem.

3 college students could just about as easily be bad neighbors as 8.

Unless the idea is that 3 students would be too poor to live in that neighborhood, in which case a rule like that is even worse than I thought.

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

#367

Post by margalabargala »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #360
paxys wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can blame Airbnb, Zillow or whoever else, but the truth is that speculation in real estate and vacation towns have both been a thing for a very long time. If the population rises and we refuse to build more houses, the existing ones will get more expensive no matter what. The solution is out there in front of us but everyone prefers to dance around it.

> One can blame Airbnb, but > speculation in ... vacation towns [has] been a thing for a very long time. > the existing [houses] will get more expensive no matter what. In vacation towns, the issue is that tourists are flooding out of hotels, and into livable dwellings. Our hotel vacancy rates are rising just as fast as our home prices. Perhaps the solution is tearing down hotels and building high-rise apartments in…

On some level, this is hotels failing to compete. If I look up both airbnbs and hotels in a popular vacation town (randomly using Big Sky, MT, april 18-20, for this example) then I see hotels and airbnbs in similar locations, and at similar price points. However, there are airbnbs cheaper than the cheapest hotels, and they have a number of amenities that no hotels offer- notably, a washer/dryer in-unit, a full kitchen, and multiple actual rooms.

Given the same nightly price, who would choose a minimal pared-down hotel room over an entire furnished condominium?

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

#368

Post by jjav »

lubesGordi wrote: post #157
ryandrake wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > It's honestly quite scary how I'm in the top 2% of income earners in my generation and yet I could barely afford to buy a small place > I live in Los Angeles, where a "small place in semi-desirable area" gets listed for 1.5M and goes for nearly 2M. I'm somewhere in the top 5% of earners in California, but that $2M 1950s tract housing would be >50% of my post-tax income. I think the obvious answer here is that peo…

I'm under the impression that 'cash offer' just means that whoever is buying has already secured their financing. That means there's almost no risk of the deal falling through and the sale can go from contingent to pending immediately. This is better for the buyer because they sell faster. Senior software eng at microsoft can pull this off no problem (no one is buying a house with cash in their bank, not even rich pe…

No, cash offer means actually pay it cash. If there's any kind of financing involved, the bank will need to approve the purchase, slowing down the process, which is what a cash offer bypasses.

> no one is buying a house with cash in their bank, not even rich people

They most certainly are. Tons of real estate sales here (Silicon Valley) are all-cash because the other people making offers are also all-cash, so the only way to make a competitive offer is if it is all-cash.

So regular people who need a mortgage are completely shut out of the market.

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

#369

Post by TomVDB »

bastawhiz wrote: post #6

I recently bought a home. We toured a Zillow home, and I can understand what they were going for and where they failed. We were able to pull up to the driveway, book a tour for that minute, and walk in the front door. It was almost a magical experience compared to the process of finding and going to showings. The listings were clear and thorough. The experience was extremely compelling. The downside: the homes were a…

I’m surprised you have an issue with arranging visits to open houses?

Open RedFin, check the houses for sale, go to the open house when there is one? That’s at least how it works in the Bay Area. We never had to schedule or book anything, and only after seeing a house we liked, we asked our agent to check it out and submit an offer.

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