Zillow (www.zillow.com) is one of my favorite real estate tools. It is never going to be completely accurate, because there is simply no way for it to know when a house has been remodeled. Despite this limitatino, it is still surprisingly useful for scanning neighborhoods to look at home values. It was right on the money on my neighborhood for about a year, but lately it has been showing values about 100k over the actual selling price due to some sort of strange readjustment. Regardless, it’s still a neat tool and its a great way to scan for houses for sale. Lately many more realtors have clued in and have been listing their houses here. It has some neat tools, for example, I can see that the medican price of a home sold in Scottsdale in the past 12 months was 432.5k (versus 207.5k for Mesa, 210k for Phoenix, and 1.583 Million for Paradise Valley).
I despise MLS, so anytime a new realtor begins listing on Zillow, I am happy. Realtors hate Zillow, of course, because they don’t like the price estimates it gives. But I hate realtors, so I guess it’s natural that I like Zillow.
There are currently 1996 homes listed for sale in Scottsdale, for a Median value of 746k. Hmm! 746k Median sale price, 432k Median Sold Price. This most likely means that more expensive homes are more likely to be listed for sale on Zillow, although I’d like to think it means that people need to lower their prices!.
