Accuracy of Zillow.com 's "Zestimates" in Prior Lake
Zillow.com is a national website aimed at sharing information to help those in all facets of the real estate marketplace. Zillow's core function is its "zestimate" tool where prospective buyers and sellers can type in an address and immediately see what the price should be for that home. It will also tell you tax information and previous sales prices or any other publicly available information relating to the home. Cool, right? Well, if it was anywhere near accurate, YES! 
But it's not.
I was recently talking with a homeowner that was trying to convince me that my local market analysis was wrong because my price wasn't the same as the zestimate he found on a national website. So I decided to peruse zillow.com and see what it was all about.
The website claims that their zestimates are within 12% of the actual sales price in the Twin Cities. That may be, but I thought it would be best to take a look at Prior Lake home prices specifically to see how they do.
Drum roll please...
I looked at all 17 single family home sales that occurred in the last 30 days and compared the actual sales price to the zestimate sales price and the results were comical.
The actual sales price for 2 of the 17 homes were actually within 5%of the zestimate. In other news, a blind squirrel just found its nut. The other 15 sales prices were at least 50% away from the zestimate. 6 of those were over 100% off and one zestimate was 262% higher than actual.
On average, the zestimates were 92% higher than the actual sales price. Yeah, almost twice as high. Not good. And not exactly 12% like the site claims for all of the Twin Cities.
Zillow.com is a good concept and I'm sure the data is a little better in other areas. It's an easy way to check tax information etc. but it is frustrating when I have to apologize to local home sellers on
behalf of zillow for their poor data when I come up with their actual
market value. I checked the information it had on my personal home and it had my home's square feet 2000 ft away from accurate and said the closest schools to my home were 2 I've never heard of in Bloomington and Burnsville. I'm a block away from Jeffers Pond Elementary...