http://www.zillow.com/

I'm not sure if the values are accurate, but I can zoom to a detailed image of my house and my S2k. Talk about creepy!!!

 

It shows tax assessed value anyway. Mine was off by about $350,000 but it is a year behind in showing the assessed value.


Neat site though. Must be one huge database.

 

Zillow's values are aweful.

I have a friend who used to work at Veros; he developed their real estate appraisal software and continues as a consultant there. Veros' numbers are very good in general, and, most important, they give you a statistical confidence score to let you know how good they think their estimate is.

He suggested that the principals of Veros fly up to Seattle to make the Zillow folks an offer: let's put our systems together - our analytics and your flashy graphics. Apparently the principals at Veros would rather fight against Zillow than cooperate with them. A stupid view, in my opinion.

 

This came up on another list and we found that in areas that update tax figures based upon sales then the numbers could be fairly close, BUT in areas that don't, such as Texas, they numbers can be hundreds of thousands of dollars off.

My house was over $60,000 off, which is good. That means my taxes are lower than they should be.

I thought they had a neat mapping system tho.

 

AVM's are a dime a dozen these days.

Numbers are often (almost always) off -- in particular in states that do not force disclosure (quite a few). If you don't live in a state that has full disclosure on each sale they are basing their numbers off of comparable sales in your area per square footage from properties that *do* disclose ... which could be many or could be very few. Obviously prices are multifactoral ... and even with full disclosure these prices are going to vary and be best estimates, not actual values.

Generally these tools are used by banks and fraud detection companies as a first line of investigation to value properties and save the expense of paying someone to do a physical drive by evaluation of the property -- which can cost as little as 50 bucks and as much as 500 bucks.

Veros mentioned above is one of the better AVM's and is resold by a lot of companies (many do cascade systems wherein they give you results from multiple systems) but is by no means the best -- as like Cell companies, there is no best nationwide -- but there is a company that has recently tried to fill that niche too with their cascade.

In the end, be happy -- you are getting a cursory glance at data which in depth costs 12-60 bucks per hit for companies that are actually paying for it.

 

Yeah way off. There are too many factors to appraise a house. I know for a fact a house sold for $850K up the street last week and on the website it shows $751K. Just for giggles and grins I input my brother's house and it show $75K above market value. On another note, the satellite images are the best I've ever seen.

Sam

 

Yep, prices are way off.

 

my house is off by a 100k+

 

The Satellite images are cool though.

 

I looked up my parent's house and they had it valued at about 30% of what homes are going for in that neighborhood.