How can a realistic comparison occur without actually inspecting the interior for renovations to kitchen, bathrooms, basements, etc
Heck, even DIY painting vs professional painting. And dated wallpaper, quality of light fixtures, landscaping, date of roof, etc. Even garages can be very different from unfinished to drywall, wall/attic insulation, epoxy floors. I look at Zillow and just shake my head at estimates among neighborhood homes.
Yes, I know its correlated to lot size and square footage. I have also bought houses before where the appraisal was made against recent sales that were like “are you kidding me” they were so bad.
In: Economics
The Zestimate is a model based on historical sold data and variables such as zip code, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, etc. This data can be used to train an algorithm that, when given new data, can predict or estimate what the price would be for that house. These models can be fairly accurate depending on the nature of the data and the methods used but of course, no model will be perfect. In particular, these models don’t always do well with very high end homes and wouldn’t be able to factor in unique features or idiosyncrasies that houses can have.
They are estimates for the exact reason because they dont have all the details.
It works decently because most of the price is in land value and in the size most other things are fixable for relative small amounts and most people will renovate anyway so it doesnt realy matter if the wallpaper is dated or the light fixture is cheap.
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