What if – Zillow is right?

Sellsius° identifies several of the “unzillowable” aspects that affect home values (and prices) and I couldn’t agree more.

Bloodhound continues his assault on Zestimates

and –

Zillow Blog wonders how close is “close enough?

Yet I have been wondering – what if Zillow’s reach becomes so great, their data become so vast and inclusive, that their Zestimates significantly impact what is fair market value? What if the purchasing and selling population refer to Zillow as the end-all, be-all estimator for their homes’ valuations? What if “close enough” is “good enough”? What if they become the de facto standard for home valuations?

Perfection with regards to a property’s valuation is a fluid thing, a moving target dependent on the “right” buyer who is ready, willing and able.

Can their data aggregation ever mitigate and/or minimize sufficiently the potential impacts of those unzillowable features? Doubtful, but they may be able to minimize the impact of the data’s shortcoming, provided they are accurate elsewhere. Might Zillow become just another tool used by Realtors?

Shoot, they’ve only been around for a very short while! Some MLS’ still publish MLS books, for goodness sakes! I honestly don’t think that we have seen data aggregation of this volume, publicly available before, and any conclusions made now about its efficacy are premature.

From the Long Tail, p. 217:

The secret to creating a thriving Long Tail business can be summarized in two imperatives:

1. Make everything available
2. Help me find it.

Zillow seems to be doing just that.

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