|
Zillow is a free service that's very easy to use. Simply enter an address, street or neighborhood together with a city, state or zip code, and Zillow searches through the information it has compiled on more than 60 million residential properties in the U.S. to provide you with an approximate valuation of the property.
Results are displayed on a map that you can zoom in or out or drag around. If you requested information on a specific property, its "zestimate" is displayed in a pop-up box, showing estimated price, number of bedrooms, baths and square feet, and links to see more details or view information about comparable homes. Zillow calculates this estimate by taking "zillions" of data points, mainly from public records, and entering them in a formula. Want more specifics? Other nearby properties are displayed on the map, each with their own estimated price. Simply click on the icon for any property to see its zestimate. Zillow relies on different sources of data than the proprietary MLS databases used by realtors. This means that while many of the estimates are reasonably close to an accurate valuation, others are less so. Unsurprisingly, estimates for large urban areas such as Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County and the Northern Virginia-Suburban Maryland-Baltimore region are more likely to be within 10% of a realistic selling price than more rural, less populated areas. Zillow offers a nice chart that displays median error, accuracy and data quality estimates for the top metropolitan areas it has compiled data for. Beneath this chart are estimates for all 50 states. |
