Please contact a licensed or certified real estate appraisal before making decisions regarding your most important asset. And, whatever you do, don't base a lending decision on Zillow.  

To order YOUR appraisal, click on "Order an Appraisal Now" to the left, or contact us:

By Phone:	(702) 253-9872 (Office)
	(877) 243-9872 (Toll Free)
	(702) 25-3-9872
By Fax:	(702) 257-0111 (Fax)
By e-mail:	Loreen@appraisersoflasvegas.com

Is Zillow a Good Alternative to Hiring An Appraiser?

If you’ve heard anything about Zillow and its so-called house price “zestimates” in the past month, you’re likely to answer this question in the negative. An online calculator created to offer the homebuyer and seller quick access to home values across the country, Zillow was supposed to revolutionize the real estate industry.

As of now, this has yet to occur. The brainchild of Rich Barton – the former CEO of Expedia who transformed the travel industry by making it easier for people to purchase plane tickets and travel packages online– Zillow was hyped up as the next big thing and intensely marketed in the media. But in the end, the excitement petered out once people had a chance to try it out. At its best, Zillow misses the dollar value of a house by 5% - 7%. At its worst, property is undervalued by much more.

For instance, according to appraisersoflasvegas.com, the first test of Zillow showed that 60% of the results were over 5% off. The second test revealed that a whopping 100% of the results were off over 5%.

For the first test, Zillow valued the homes 6.2%, 2.8%, 14.0%, 1.5% and 8.0% below recent appraisals.

In the second test, Zillow failed to find three of the properties and undervalued the rest by 19.5%, 27.0%, 11.3%, 8.0%, 10.7% and 11.9%.

In addition, the site lacks information for many areas across the country and often experiences moments of inconsistency when requesting house prices. You may be able to search for a house at one moment and the next moment, the property is nowhere to be found.

To assess a home, Zillow takes into consideration historical property values, square footage, number of bedrooms and neighboring homes to calculate a house price. The numbers that seem to come out of the system, as a result, are extremely inaccurate. Zillow’s methodology is similar in many ways to valuation approaches utilized by realtors who arrive at a number by comparing features, such as number of bedrooms and square footage, with similar homes that sold in the neighborhood. Valuing a home by “comps” usually means the agent estimates a house value by calculating the price per square foot. Essentially, they divide the sale price by the living area and average the results. Of course, this method is lacking, in that it consistently undervalues an above-average home and overvalues a below-average home.

There is more to valuing a house than looking at the size, neighborhood and number of bedrooms. A qualified and certified appraiser, for example, takes much more into consideration when conducting an analysis of a person’s home. Homes with a pool, spectacular view, large lot size and other upgrades or unique attributes sell for significantly more than comparable homes in the same neighborhood. Zillow and realtors who have not physically visited homes in a given area are not equipped with the right knowledge to make a proper valuation when all aspects of a home’s value are factored into the calculation.

In the end, only a professional and licensed appraiser has the requisite tools, education, and skills to conduct a full sales comparison analysis and appraisal. Appraisers examine a home and its features on a line-by-line basis to arrive at an appraisal that is accurate, complete and trustworthy. Can a computer program achieve the same results? Not by a long shot.

This article was written by Don Foster Scoggins of http://www.appraisersoflasvegas.com/. Appraisers of Las Vegas, voted top appraisal firm in Las Vegas for five consecutive years, appraise houses to high rises, condos to casinos in Las Vegas and residential properties of Nevada. With over 20 appraisers on staff and over 200 years of experience, Appraisers of Las Vegas can create an accurate report delivered to you within 24 to 48 hours of inspection. Reproductions of this article are encouraged but must include a link pointing to http://www.appraisersoflasvegas.com/.

Here's a "Pro" article on the topic

Finding the Values of U.S. Homes

By Chris Sherman, Executive Editor
March 15, 2006

Talking about the "real estate bubble" is a popular parlor game these days. Now you can find your own estimates for how over-or-under valued your neighborhood is thanks to a new web site called Zillow.

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? See the what's a zestimate page for details.

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.

With this beta version of the site, Zillow estimates that for the entire nation there's a median error of just 7.2%, with 62% of all estimates falling within 10% of an actual selling price. This makes Zillow a useful tool for monitoring real-estate values, but it's far
from a 100% accurate indicator that you can unfailingly rely upon.

However, Zillow also offers another cool tool called "My Zestimator" that lets you supplement and refine zestimates for any house, whether you own it or not. With this tool, you can update facts about the house, add information on home improvements, and refine a list of comparables.

And you needn't worry about your local tax authorities using the data you provide to hit you up with a larger bill. Once you've entered additional information and updated the zestimate, Zillow doesn't let you save it. You can print it out, but there's no option to keep the data for future use.

Zillow joins a growing number of hybrid tools that merge real-estate information with maps and other tools. About a month ago, Gary Price wrote a SearchDay article called Terrific Real Estate Search Tools that covered many of these new applications.

Just as online travel services opened up a whole new world to travellers, allowing people to search on their own for information about flights, hotels and other travel related products and services, we're seeing a similar trend in the real estate arena, long dominated
by agents and brokers who have traditionally held information very closely.

Interestingly, Zillow was created by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, founders of pioneering online travel service Expedia.com. Sites like Zillow will certainly have an impact on the real estate industry, but Zillow's goal isn't to put professionals out of business. Quite the contrary, the company plans a number of programs aimed at real estate professionals.

Even if you don't own a home, it's fascinating to play around with Zillow and observe the striking differences between property prices, both between different regions, and even at the neighborhood level. And Zillow's also a great source of information for speculating on the current state of the so-called real estate bubble many pundits are worrying about.

Please contact a licensed or certified real estate appraisal before making decisions regarding your most important asset. And, whatever you do, don't base a lending decision on Zillow.  

To order YOUR appraisal, click on "Order an Appraisal Now" to the left, or contact us:

By Phone:	(702) 253-9872 (Office)
	(877) 243-9872 (Toll Free)
	(702) 25-3-9872
By Fax:	(702) 257-0111 (Fax)
By e-mail:	Loreen@appraisersoflasvegas.com

Is Zillow a Good Alternative to Hiring An Appraiser?

If you’ve heard anything about Zillow and its so-called house price “zestimates” in the past month, you’re likely to answer this question in the negative. An online calculator created to offer the homebuyer and seller quick access to home values across the country, Zillow was supposed to revolutionize the real estate industry.

As of now, this has yet to occur. The brainchild of Rich Barton – the former CEO of Expedia who transformed the travel industry by making it easier for people to purchase plane tickets and travel packages online– Zillow was hyped up as the next big thing and intensely marketed in the media. But in the end, the excitement petered out once people had a chance to try it out. At its best, Zillow misses the dollar value of a house by 5% - 7%. At its worst, property is undervalued by much more.

For instance, according to appraisersoflasvegas.com, the first test of Zillow showed that 60% of the results were over 5% off. The second test revealed that a whopping 100% of the results were off over 5%.

For the first test, Zillow valued the homes 6.2%, 2.8%, 14.0%, 1.5% and 8.0% below recent appraisals.

In the second test, Zillow failed to find three of the properties and undervalued the rest by 19.5%, 27.0%, 11.3%, 8.0%, 10.7% and 11.9%.

In addition, the site lacks information for many areas across the country and often experiences moments of inconsistency when requesting house prices. You may be able to search for a house at one moment and the next moment, the property is nowhere to be found.

To assess a home, Zillow takes into consideration historical property values, square footage, number of bedrooms and neighboring homes to calculate a house price. The numbers that seem to come out of the system, as a result, are extremely inaccurate. Zillow’s methodology is similar in many ways to valuation approaches utilized by realtors who arrive at a number by comparing features, such as number of bedrooms and square footage, with similar homes that sold in the neighborhood. Valuing a home by “comps” usually means the agent estimates a house value by calculating the price per square foot. Essentially, they divide the sale price by the living area and average the results. Of course, this method is lacking, in that it consistently undervalues an above-average home and overvalues a below-average home.

There is more to valuing a house than looking at the size, neighborhood and number of bedrooms. A qualified and certified appraiser, for example, takes much more into consideration when conducting an analysis of a person’s home. Homes with a pool, spectacular view, large lot size and other upgrades or unique attributes sell for significantly more than comparable homes in the same neighborhood. Zillow and realtors who have not physically visited homes in a given area are not equipped with the right knowledge to make a proper valuation when all aspects of a home’s value are factored into the calculation.

In the end, only a professional and licensed appraiser has the requisite tools, education, and skills to conduct a full sales comparison analysis and appraisal. Appraisers examine a home and its features on a line-by-line basis to arrive at an appraisal that is accurate, complete and trustworthy. Can a computer program achieve the same results? Not by a long shot.

This article was written by Don Foster Scoggins of http://www.appraisersoflasvegas.com/. Appraisers of Las Vegas, voted top appraisal firm in Las Vegas for five consecutive years, appraise houses to high rises, condos to casinos in Las Vegas and residential properties of Nevada. With over 20 appraisers on staff and over 200 years of experience, Appraisers of Las Vegas can create an accurate report delivered to you within 24 to 48 hours of inspection. Reproductions of this article are encouraged but must include a link pointing to http://www.appraisersoflasvegas.com/.

Here's a "Pro" article on the topic

Finding the Values of U.S. Homes

By Chris Sherman, Executive Editor
March 15, 2006

Talking about the "real estate bubble" is a popular parlor game these days. Now you can find your own estimates for how over-or-under valued your neighborhood is thanks to a new web site called Zillow.

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? See the what's a zestimate page for details.

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.

With this beta version of the site, Zillow estimates that for the entire nation there's a median error of just 7.2%, with 62% of all estimates falling within 10% of an actual selling price. This makes Zillow a useful tool for monitoring real-estate values, but it's far
from a 100% accurate indicator that you can unfailingly rely upon.

However, Zillow also offers another cool tool called "My Zestimator" that lets you supplement and refine zestimates for any house, whether you own it or not. With this tool, you can update facts about the house, add information on home improvements, and refine a list of comparables.

And you needn't worry about your local tax authorities using the data you provide to hit you up with a larger bill. Once you've entered additional information and updated the zestimate, Zillow doesn't let you save it. You can print it out, but there's no option to keep the data for future use.

Zillow joins a growing number of hybrid tools that merge real-estate information with maps and other tools. About a month ago, Gary Price wrote a SearchDay article called Terrific Real Estate Search Tools that covered many of these new applications.

Just as online travel services opened up a whole new world to travellers, allowing people to search on their own for information about flights, hotels and other travel related products and services, we're seeing a similar trend in the real estate arena, long dominated
by agents and brokers who have traditionally held information very closely.

Interestingly, Zillow was created by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, founders of pioneering online travel service Expedia.com. Sites like Zillow will certainly have an impact on the real estate industry, but Zillow's goal isn't to put professionals out of business. Quite the contrary, the company plans a number of programs aimed at real estate professionals.

Even if you don't own a home, it's fascinating to play around with Zillow and observe the striking differences between property prices, both between different regions, and even at the neighborhood level. And Zillow's also a great source of information for speculating on the current state of the so-called real estate bubble many pundits are worrying about.