Third-party residential real estate sites can be blessing and bane
Zillow, Trulia (a Zillow subsidiary) and Realtor.com dominate the online house search market. When I do an open house, the majority of the buyers come from Zillow. All three of these sites provide a lot of information, but you often need to take some of their numbers with a grain of salt. Probably the most infamous example of this is Zillow’s Zestimate, which is supposed to tell you the value of your house. The problem is that it is not very good, often missing the mark by a hundred thousand dollars or more. At the high end, they can miss the market by over a million dollars.
If the Zestimate and other similar estimates on Realtor.com or Trulia were just fun carnival guessing games, that would be fine, but these estimates shape both buyers’ and sellers’ behavior. I’ve had buyers refuse to go see houses because the list price was higher than the Zestimates. What is even more insidious is that thousands of buyers don’t go see houses because of a low online price estimate, and they never tell their Realtor that they were interested in those houses.
On the sellers’ side, captains of finance have told me that my and my fellow agents’ proposed list price is too low, according to these online price estimates, and as a result, once they do get someone to list it at an even higher price, with no negotiation room, the house just sits on the market.
But if the Greenwich tax assessor’s fair market value and the third-party site estimates are similar, then they may well be on to something, but remember that factors like wetlands, environmental issues, a beautiful view, or recent renovations may mean these value estimates are just wrong.
The big real estate sites have lots of information. Some is accurate and helpful, and some is not, so caveat emptor when using these sites.