On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:56:56 -0400, "Eisboch" wrote:


"Eisboch" wrote in message
news

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:11:44 -0400, "Eisboch" wrote:


"Calif Bill" wrote in message
...



Looking at Zillow regards my home, it says $819k while smaller homes
down
the street are rated the same or higher. Seems as if is a low rating
as
the equivelent home was $1.2mm 8 months ago. And homes in this area
have
not dropped like a lot of other regions. Close upscale housing for
Silicon Valley.

I am telling ya, Zillow has revised their valuations, including
historical
data.

Yep. I think we've pretty much figured that out.

Now the question is why.

Perhaps they were overestimating values a tad?

My guess is this:

Zillow is connected with realtors or a home marketing network somehow.
They are always asking you if your house is for sale and encourage you to
list it. They even had a campaign for a while encouraging a "what offer
would it take to sell it" deal.

Inflating the market value was a means to falsely encourage people to list
their home, thinking they could get more for it than it was really worth.

Forgot to finish my theory.

With all the heat currently on the housing market and mortgages, etc., I
think maybe Zillow realized it should clean up their act before they became
exposed. Just my guess.

Hmmmm - makes sense to me. There is a connection between different
marketing networks and Zillow now.

There had been a huge fight between Zillow and brokers because of
Zillow's potential to usurp brokers authority and data.

Maybe they brought the values in line with broker data and begin to
build a relationship between them.

I know here in CT, they are pretty accurate because the data brokers
use is readily available to Zillow - it's public information.