Cost of Housing

[Copper]

3 years ago next month I sold my home in northern VA for $755K, reasonable at the time.

Today I noticed that the Zillow estimate is $1.05M

Wow 30%+ in 3 years, crazy

[LuFins Dad]

Yeah, property values went way up after you and 89th left... Not saying there's a correlation, but...

[89th]

Never realized how often I drove past your street! I worked just up the road.

[Klaus]

What is a Zillow estimate? Just some generic algorithm that only considers a few basic numbers, such as size and age? Couldn't it be very inaccurate, then? Or is somebody actually selling the property and this is the price (s)he offered?

[89th]

@Klaus Zillow is one of the top real estate websites and yes, uses an algorithm to estimate the current value from more than just a few basic numbers. It compares nearby sales, trends, local demand, and certainly age and size of the house, etc. That being said, it's very much a ballpark guess with a wider margin of error the higher the value of the house goes up. But if he sold it 3 years ago for $755 and the estimate is now $1.05, there's good odds it would sell today for at least $950.

[Copper]

Zillow's estimate of its accuracy

These tables break down the accuracy of Zestimates for both active listings and off-market listings.

https://www.zillow.com/z/zestimate/

The nationwide median error rate for the Zestimate for on-market homes is 1.9%, while the Zestimate for off-market homes has a median error rate of 6.9%.