Some days the project at hand doesn’t tell much of a story, so it gets dropped.
Today’s idea was to check zillow’s zestimates vs. actual sales prices in Carmel Valley, CA 92130. There were 21 detached sales since December 1st where zillow knew the sales price, yet their zestimate was 4.8% higher on average. What good are they when they know the sales price, and they’re still almost 5% wrong? So I dropped it, and captured some video instead:
A funny story about those two in La jolla. When they were filming the movie Traffic, my friend owned the home next to the house the Traffic house. Anyways his six year old son went to go to his tree house (which was super plush) and he noticed two older people inside his tree house. He ran to his dad in fear and dad went to check it out. He went up the ladder and recognized the occupants as Michael Douglas and Katherine…when he asked what they were doing in his son’s tree house they replied “relaxing”. So that tree house became there spot all through the filming and my buddy got a bunch of pics and autographs from the whole cast of that movie. So apparently they have a fondness for San Diego.
Is it possible Zillow’s zestimates have not been updated with the recent sales data? Maybe they don’t update frequently?
It would take some more work, but perhaps an interesting way to study the zestimates would be to record the zestimate on the day a listing goes pending. Then, compare to the closing price.
Zillow is probably putting in values for what they think the house is worth or could have commanded. If they are off by 5% then someone in their view got a deal.