<p>You put in your address and it shows a satellite photo (not very clear) and gives real estate information, including a valuation. My house is pretty accurate - the only real mistake is they’ve left off a half-bath. I just hope the value listed is close to accurate.</p>
<p>everytime I turn around they add $50,000 to our value.
I checked it on zillow and sure enough, it went up $60,000 from what we paid taxes on in october
if you can’t afford to move- the increase doesn’t do you so good</p>
<p>I checked this out just yesterday. It seems <em>reasonably</em> accurate but to my trained eye, some properties were $50K low, some $50K high, many right within the ball park.</p>
<p>they supposedly get the info from the taxing district= it corresponds to the info we got from the county saying they were raising our assessment again</p>
<p>the main west coast towsn like seattle ( where it is headquartered) sanfrancisco and L.A, have detailed updated information, sounds like other parts of the country not so much.</p>
<p>May work better for outer suburbs where valuations are fairly consistent. In the city valuations can swing dramatically within a few blocks. Makes comparables difficult.</p>
<p>“Zillow.com’s free service is not foolproof, and Barton admits that the home valuation tool is very much in the early stages of development. For example, Zestimates for homes in Washington, D.C., are not available because the nation’s capital does not collect historical property transactions. Large pockets of New York also are not served by Zillow, as is the case for most of Idaho.”</p>
<p>ya it is scary-and annoying- we get so many offers for our house- and some of the info the county has is inaccurate- when I have tried to correct it they say- “oh it doesn’t matter”
and all this info is free- when you pay for a service you can get even more personal info-
I have given up trying to “go under the wire” and just stay on top of what is being done with the info- like with our credit reports</p>
<p>I’ve seen sites like this before - Yahoo real estate used to give out more info than they do now, and Google Earth and others have the satellite photos, but I’ve never seen them put together like this before. </p>
<p>Not very accurate for my neighborhood, where houses are more one of a kind, not development. This seems to be accessing appraised value, not sales prices. Houses generally sell for 60 to 70% over appraised value here, sometimes even more.</p>
<p>Its pulling up recent sales history in my Calif. neighborhood. It’s scary, but when I looked at the chart that includes data for the past year, it also looks pretty accurate. They’ve pretty much got my house valued the same as the current listing price for a house up the block. </p>
<p>I would like to point out that college financial aid people probably know about sites like this and are likely to use them to verify information provided on the CSS Profile about home equity… so if you are tempted to low ball the figures in order to improve financial aid standing, be careful.</p>
<p>Roshke, well houses are re-assessed at time of sale here, so those would be the current comps for our [non-development] neighborhood.</p>
<p>Calmom, I don’t know if it matters, but I derive our home equity from the appraisal at the time of its last loan minus the mortage and line of credit balance. I <em>think</em> with that documentation I’m on safe ground. Not that it’s gone up a lot since then.</p>
<p>TheDad - I think they do it differently here with assessments. I’m confident that the numbers are way off for us though - a close friend and neighbor on my street has just listed her house for double the estimate on this site, and houses generally sell for close to listing price. Only comparables were of houses that needed a ton of work. Renovations aren’t taken into account either - my friend’s house has been totally redone for example.</p>
<p>TheDad, I think it kind of depends on when that last loan was in terms of whether you are safe. I refinanced last year, so I’ve got a recent appraisal and of course am relying on that. The numbers on zillow.com are almost $100K higher than my appraisal, but they are based on comps from last July, and I think the market peaked around then, sales are slower now. In any case, I used some other online resources last Nov. when I did the Profile, so I’m confident that my figures are reasonable.</p>
<p>But according to Zillow, my California hovel has tripled in value in the past 10 years – and its current value is 2.4 times its assessed value (and more than 3 times what I paid for it). So lets pretend for a minute that I didn’t have a recent appraisal, and instead tried to calculate based on the lower appraised value figure – or the even lower figure that represents what the value of the house was when I bought it. In terms of actual money in my pocket, that would be fair enough: as long as I persist in this folly of wanting to live in the place, I don’t get any richer no matter how much the market value increases. Can’t spend a house. </p>
<p>What Zillow tells me is that if I was dumb enough to try that, it might be a big red flag on the financial aid app. The more useful info from Zillow might be the “value range” it reports – that gives me some leeway, but also tells me the boundaries. </p>
<p>My daughter found a web site a few months ago that would show what a given sum of money - say, $500,000 - would buy in various parts of the country. Sorry I don’t have the link for that - we had fun comparing the mansions in the midwest to our little shack. So its tempting to want to hedge a little on the Profile – I mean, it really isn’t fair that I should have to pay more for college than a family with the same income who lives in a house in Arkansas that is 3 times the size of ours and costs them half as much in monthly mortgage payments. I certainly have less discretionary income and less cash on hand.</p>
<p>But the bottom line is that I really need to use realistic figures. Five years ago someone advised me that I could use the “Federal Housing Index” calculator at <a href=“http://www.finaid.org/calculators/federalhousing.phtml[/url]”>http://www.finaid.org/calculators/federalhousing.phtml</a> - which calculates a “minimum derived value” based on purchase price and year of purchase. It gives a very conservative estimate of home value. In my case it comes up with a number that is 54% of the Zillow number, around 60% of the value at the last appraisal. Five years ago I felt reasonably safe using that calculation – now I don’t. If an inquiry was made, I’d have no excuse – I’d have to have my head in the sand if I didn’t at least have a vague idea of what my home was worth in today’s market. </p>
<p>Anyway, this is a California perspective. This probably isn’t much of a problem in many parts of the country.</p>
<p>according to Zillow, my house is worth less than what I paid for it 15 years ago…I’d love to use that for FA, but I am afraid it’s not too accurate.</p>
