The Zillow CEO yesterday, responding on twitter to the News Corp acquisition of Move, Inc., and realtor.com:
Game on.
— Spencer Rascoff (@spencerrascoff) September 30, 2014
Spence came out swinging at everybody today, and then stated that Zillow has 60,000 agents paying an average of $300 per month for advertising:
I have observed very large radical swings in North County Coastal zestimates in last few months…..and some erasing of these previous values as if they never existed….what’s up with that?
They have done that several times in the past…revisionist history. In particular, after both crashes, they revised all SD estimates I followed and revised what their “historical” estimates had been-very shady practice.
“Game on”
Which one, “The Price Is Right” or “Jeopardy”?
Hi all,
Russ from Zillow here. Yes. When major improvements to the algorithm are made, we do re-compute the historical Zestimates for affected homes. We do this to provide consumers with the best estimate of historical property valuations. A historical Zestimate is not like a historical stock price, which doesn’t change after being recorded. A stock price is a record of an actual empirical event(and, as such, shouldn’t change). A Zestimate, on the other hand, is an estimate of the market value of a home, and can change when we have a better algorithm to estimate that value.
Over the past few weeks we have, indeed, been rolling out updates to our algorithm, including a better method for handling missing home data, improvements to the use of comparable sales and inclusion of additional data. These changes may result in significant changes to individual Zestimates and Zestimate histories. This is likely what some of you have seen. We do feel strongly — and have data to back this up — that overall accuracy and stability of the Zestimate is improved. If it wasn’t we simply wouldn’t do it! 🙂
Feel free to reach out to me at russh at zillow dot com if you have any questions at all.
Thank you!
Russ
Zillow really has sharp killer instinct. Bodes well for the company.