Homes.com Lauches It's Own Zestimate

Homes.com has just announced the launch of a way for visitors to get an unbiased valuation on 90 million properties; they can simply enter an address on the search page and up comes the number! (from the Homes.com blog)


Since valuation tools had nothing to do with the housing bubble (wait, they did...), and since an appraisal is just an opinion, anyway (actually no, it's not...), giving an "unbiased valuation" of a house is just a bit of innocent fun, right?

Nevertheless, Homes.com is jumping on the Zillow Zestimate bandwagon, creating a "an automatically generated estimate of a home’s fair market value based on a number of factors including historical home price trends, recently sold comparable homes and tax assessments in the home’s neighborhood."  Now, none of this is legally binding, nor does it account for homes that have not purchased a Homes.com listing.

Firstly, isn't this eeriliy similar to the conflict of interest wherewhich banks pay credit ratings agencies to guarantee the value of loans?  Now I don't think that Zillow or Dominion Enterprises (the parent company of Homes.com) has any nefarious plans to defraud website visitors, but the fact remains that even though Zillow and Dominion are quite large, neither fully represents the national real estate market as a whole.  And, if you want a Zestimate or Home Value of your home, you need to pay the same service to put up your listing that will assigns your listing a pricetag.  Do we really trust that this to be "unbaiased?"

Secondly, Zestimates have proven to be notoriously wrong.  In fact, if you google "Zillow Zestimate," the fifth result down is entitled: "Why is the Zestimate so inaccurate?"

Online Marketing Group consults many developers and landlords in and around New York City, who are continually infuriated by the Zestimate misinforming the consumer, in some cases refusing to list their properties on the website.  The secret algorithm of the Zestimate has perpetually failed to account for subtle pricing issues (like luxury amenities for example), as well as stark and obvious factors, such as the property happening to be a highrise, or perhaps an affordable housing complex in an urban area.  Then, tracking this history compounds the valuation inaccuracy.  The fact is that recent sales data over the past decade is incredibly skewed, and no one-size-fits-all valuation tool can possibly be accurate across a broad area.

For example, I "home-valued" condo prices by our office, and a magic number of $2.6 million in the Flatiron Building came up without any reference to bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, floor or anything else. 

All of it seems a little Zuspicious to me...

via onlinemarketinggrp.com

My post on the OMG blog.

Transparency vs. Anonymity

via namesake.com

I agree that this is a deeply divisive and compelling issue, but I don't think that online identity can be reduced to this binary polarity.

The very idea of personal identity is an extraordinarily complex and cloudy concept, and how we interact online has evolved utterly beyond recognition since the dial up days of my childhood. So your digital footprint isn't really a definitive thing; and I think it will be something completely different in a few years...

Mark Zuckerburg might be the paragon of transparency ("They trust me — dumb fucks..."), but this argument totally ignores who controls your information/identity. Of course Zuckerberg promotes voluntary transparency because Facebook controls and sells your information. And Wikileaks and other anonymous whistleblowers are often the only reason that governments and corporations are forced to be transparent. Despite your personal opinions about methodology (i.e.4chan might be Anonymous, but hardly represents the ideal of anonymity), transparency is often only ultimately possible through the condition of a less powerful critic's anonymity.

Therefore, transparency doesn't quite conflict or oppose anonymity, but I think this discussion about privacy and the power over information is just beginning...