Zillow CEO Overpaid for His Los Angeles Home, According to Zillow | Hacker News Reader

Zillow CEO Overpaid for His Los Angeles Home, According to Zillow

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73 pointsprostoalex51 comments

Is it really fair to judge their algorithm on "one of the most expensive sales of 2016"? Only a tiny, tiny portion of the half million houses sold in the US each year would be even approaching the 20 million USD mark. His service isn't intended to service the mega rich.

It is intended to depress the net worth of middle class homeowners.

How so? Zillow shows my house as being worth 50k more than I paid for it 11 months ago.

Information asymmetry sometimes defines an entire market (like salaries!). When you take away that asymmetry you change the market.

I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but I assume that is what the GP is getting at.

How do you know your house shouldn't be worth even more? I'm not actually saying that it is or should. I don't have a clue where you live or what percentage of the total value 50K is, but that doesn't mean much.

Never assume malice when a shitty model will suffice.

That's what the oligarchy say.

Sufficiently advanced shittiness is indistinguishable from malice.

Lower land values would be exactly what California's premier areas need to make homeownership affordable to the middle class again.

You don't need cheap land to get cheap housing. It is possible to build buildings with many floors.

How do you know that this is a fact? This is a serious accusation that you make here.

The model was off by 5%.

Sounds like a pretty good estimate to me, particularly considering the paucity of back data for this kind of inventory.

Those kind of ultra lux purchases are closer to the art markets than to the commodity housing ones. So - it is actually pretty good.

Pretty much this. 5% isn't bad, especially when you're working with something very unique. In that price range, you're buying your subjective taste in addition to the value.

Gotta say, by my tastes, that's one of the nicest places I've ever seen. I really like the layout and the living area flowing into the back patio/yard like that. It's too bad my market is more like 300k homes in Maine :D

I live in the Midwest and our home prices are relatively flat over the last decade for the city I live in. 18 months ago I noticed that my zestimate was inflated and rose to 2x my appraised value of my home (refinanced that year). I looked into it and noticed that Zillow was doubling the sales price of recent homes. This was the main issue. I reported it to Zillow and some in customer service said their engineers would look into it. Only in the last few months have th Zestimates come back to reality.

I bring this up because I was curious as to how this would play out for my city and home prices. Would this increase prices for the area or would realitors ignore the data and go with what they knew would make sense.

I haven't seen a huge increase in prices nor have a done any study of it. But just the idea that a bug could cause such a calamity for a least the size of a city was eye opening.

I have a friend who is a realtor and we talk about this subject occasionally. My understanding is that most realtors will recommend using Zillow to "get a feel" for the market. But Zillow's estimates are only as good as the data that goes into them. Usually, data for an area is publicly available and up-to-date, but sometimes it's very old or just plain wrong.

I think Zillow claims their estimates to be within 10% of actual sale price. To me, that figure seem to be pretty good from a data analysis stand point; but 10% of the value of a house is a lot of money for even a modest home.

Most realtors used closed databases, like MLS, to document sales and compare area housing prices. I believe MLS data is typically manually entered and verified (I'm not 100% sure about this though). I believe there is also a lot of extra metadata added to MLS listings that Zillow can't get from public records. Realtors also tend to look at property tax assessments for their areas in order to gauge market trends (just like Zillow does, except without a hidden algorithm).

It's not surprising that Zillow's AVM [1] isn't accurate for this sale. The model needs local comparable sales data to function properly which it didn't have in this case; it's not everyday that mansions are bought and sold. The next best thing it can do is look at the last recorded sale (or tax assessor's indication of value) and project out by looking at market trends and applying some other proprietary mumbo-jumbo to come up with a price.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_valuation_model

I didn't realize people actually cared about zillow zestimates. I'm not trying to be mean, I love Zillow as someone too introverted to go to open houses but still curious what the inside of homes look like around me.

I live in a city (stl) where less than one mile north are houses <30k and less than a mile west re >1m and one block east are 150-200 and one block west are 500k.

Whenever houses sell around me my zestimate goes nuts but we have a smaller house in the middle of 100+ year old 4k square foot homes. They sell for either MUCH higher prices (someone kept it up) or much less (they didn't) causing our estimate as a unrelated newer home to go haywire.

I would never expect an algorithmic prediction of property prices to do well on a very unusual ("one of the most expensive sales of 2016") property.

Zillow's estimates in general may or may not be useful -- and personally, i'd be awfully interested in finding out more about their (presumably proprietary secret) algorithms. But "one of the most expensive sales of 2016" is not a good example to say anything about how the algorithm functions in general.

I don't see how a model is supposed to accurately predict a house's selling price when in many markets people look at those estimated prices and add a percentage.

What do you mean? If there's an easy way to improve on the accuracy of the estimated price, by eg adding a percentage, shouldn't you just bake that simple way into your model in the first place?

recurse.

If the recursion converges, just take that price as the output of your model?

If it diverges or oscillates: what's the point?

Exactly. There are many reasons why a house sells above its estimated price. Several people might have been interested in it, for instance.

So the Redfin and Zillow price of my house I purchased in Oct. 2015 is off about 125K from my purchase price (1.125M) and misses the 400K in remodel. I checked the houses on the same street that sold since and they are off by 200-400K from the ASP. To be fair I live in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley and the housing prices are crazy stupid. Anywhere else in the US the house would be 400-500K.

Maybe anywhere else in California. A house that is 1.125M in SV right now goes for about 150-200k in many parts of the US.

I wish I could pick up properties that my parents own in western Maine and drop them in seacoast New Hampshire. A town house that might scrape 80k up there would be worth 300-400k down here, assuming it was a barely livable shithole.

Technically that 80k "livable shithole" is still an 80k "livable shithole" and the remaining 320k is the value of land/location :)

Totally. Being within 50 miles of places that actually have jobs helps too.

I've seen condemned, complete teardowns in this area selling for more than 250k

Or you could have the situation a couple of blocks from me: 1920s remodel that was awesome in the inside sold for $850k. Crappy 1940s house with one owner for 40 years (and it shows) is Zestimated to be the same price as they have the same stats in square footage and bathrooms. They are listing for a reasonable $575k.

Zestimates are a complete joke. They can complain that they don't have all the facts (but they can infer from the wording of "needs work" and "recently remodeled") but that's like if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass a hopin.

What I don't get is that they have the data on millions of sales. Surely they can come up with something that's not 30% off. At that rate you minus well just guess at a price and be better off.

Because a more accurate estimate of value requires well-formed data. They would need a good way to judge condition and other characteristics that might require a very subtle interpretation of a listing, or might require an in-person visit to a property.

These kinds of judgements are much more complicated than traditional machine learning. My guess is that they are feeding easily-obtained data into a machine learning algorithm, and quality of property, interpretation of a listing, and viewing of pictures, is not something that's easy to feed into a machine learning algorithm.

If the CEO is overpaid himself, I see no problem overpaying for a house :)

Generally I find that Redfin's estimates are more accurate than Zillow's. Zillow often is off by more than 10% compared to market prices.

That's a nice house

Pity about the furnishing/interiors. What is it with rich americans having such banal taste? Looks like a bland hotel

Looks European to me, I like it and I'm not American. (I'm in Europe)

Aren't those the pictures from the real estate agent? You probably want to keep things as simple and 'blank' as possible when trying to sell a house so that people can easily visualize their own tastes onto the house.

That's definitely a European style on the interior. It wouldn't look out of place in Zurich.

Rich people in general, I think. 90% of rich-person houses in Ireland have terribly uninspired (though often very expensive) interiors, too. This one does seem like more of a mess than most, tho.

I suspect that the house was 'staged' - where a specialist interior designer purposefully chose items that filled the rooms but that were bland enough as to not put off a buyer.

From a PR perspective this is a horrible move any way you slice it. If I were on the board I would be fuming right now.

What a pathetic example of clickbait. Zillow's zestimates are wildly inaccurate. My own home had a zestimate for 2.5x its value. When we sold it, we got an offer well above what it was worth, but about half the zestimate. We viewed the deal as fantastic, and ignored Zillow. In the years since we sold, the zestimate has fallen lower. Go figure.

I would only pay 5...

Humble brag?

$20M for Zillow CEO's home. Zillow itself loses $25 million per quarter. Well done.

Maybe with a diff CEO they could achieve $50million in the hole per quarter, who knows?

Not really. . .

The company — which completed its $2.5 billion acquisition of Trulia in February 2015 — reported quarterly revenues of $186 million, a 25 percent gain over the same period last year. It also boosted its revenue projections for the year to $825 million to $835 million, up from a previously stated range of $805 million to $815 million.

Are you referencing the Move Inc legal battle?

In fact, the company’s litigation costs during the quarter tallied $15.7 million, $4 million higher than Zillow expected. Total loss for the quarter was $47.6 million.

For the full year, Zillow expects to spend $50 million to $55 million defending itself in the case involving Move Inc.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/zillow-group-posts-25-revenue-g...

Total loss for the quarter was $47.6 million.

the company’s litigation costs during the quarter tallied $15.7 million

Therefore the company's loss for the quarter without the legal costs was 47.6 - 15.7 = $31.9 million.

http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/Z/financials

Quarterly data says last 4 quarter net income is -47M, -25M, -26M, -38M.

It might be fine that they're losing money because they're growing (LNKD never was profitable but made off well eh?). Still doesn't mean they're not losing money.

Zillow announced they're settling with Move Inc for $130 million - http://www.wsj.com/articles/zillow-to-settle-trade-secrets-s...

Yeah he seems terrible with his 96% approval rating from employees https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zillow-Reviews-E40802.htm

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