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Comment by dpierce9 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote on the estimates. We bought a house for X and renovated it. The day before we listed it both Zillow and Redfin estimate had an estimate around the purchase price X. When we listed it for 2X, both companies changed their estimate to be close to the listing. However, Redfin changed the entire price history as well showing a gentle slope. Zillow preserved their previous history and showed a spike.

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+1 I have always been annoyed by Redfin's rewrite of history. At least have the decency to show two lines (original prediction for last year and how it turned out to be).

Same, I find this to be a bizarre practice. What's the point if the snapshots are revised?

I assume the rationale is that it's are supposed to be an indicator of the actual value of the property at a point in time, not the accuracy of their algorithm at that point in time. So if they update with new information, it's assumed that instead of the price suddenly jumping (which looks very odd if you're trying to understand a local property market), the original snapshots are assumed to have been wrong

At least in my area, they've completely given up on providing a "historical" estimate of the house in question and just have a trend graph for the general area. I assume this data is also heavily massaged, too, though.

I am guessing they don't save the price history as snapshots. They have the current estimate, and then they walk it back in time from the market averages.

This happens all the time with most data providers.

Another anecdote - We sold a house in late 2020, decided to get an offer through zillow first, since we had a newborn and staging would have been a hassle.

Zillow lowballed us 10% under their zestimate, and still tacked on an 8% fee - we ended up going with a realtor instead, and ended up getting 15% over the Zestimate, with a 6.5% fee.

Noticed the same, but I still think Zillow tweaks historical but just not as brazenly as Redfin.

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