Friday, February 10, 2006

What's Your Home Worth?

Now we do-it-yourselfers have another tool in the real estate arsenal: www.zillow.com.

It's a new site launched by the former Microsoft exec & Expedia founder. You can enter an address and get appraisals for every home in the neighborhood--at no charge, and without giving your contact information to an agent.

The results for my neighborhood showed an accurate satellite image and current tax appraisal values for each home. My neighborhood has many original homeowners, so the overall values are deceptively low. Only the homes sold in the last two years had appraisals close to what today's market would bring.

I would not substitute Zillow for the seasoned advice of a real estate pro; there are many subtleties to pricing a home that a search engine cannot compute. Still, it's nice to have more information literally at our fingertips!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

BUMMER! No data available for my state!!!! What a cool site, thanks Meredith, but grrrrr!

debbie

Anonymous said...

In Nashville we already had access to a lot of this information at Nashville.org. You can look at all the online property maps and get recent tax assesments and sales prices and all that. Which is why Zillow is semi-useful in this area, unlike where my parents live.

TheNormalMiddle said...

Exactly and well said---I looked up our home and our tax value was right, but the market value is way off for our neighborhood and our area.

Nice tool, but not a substitute.

Found your blog through a link on another blog, love it! I like some good frugality too!

Anonymous said...

It worked for my state, and the estimate seemed pretty accurate to me. Nice tool!

Meredith said...

Jordana, can you believe I'd never heard of Nashville.org? My aunt, a realtor, does such an obsessive job helping us pull property values through her MLS software that I haven't had to do much on my own.

Anonymous said...

I live in TN, but I keep getting a message that an error has occured, no matter how many times I try. Frustrating!!!

Meredith said...

I think they're still having some technical problems. I was trying to check on our first home, to see if it had been sold since then, but Zillow says there is no data for that zip code (10 minutes east in the same county)!

Anonymous said...

Hi Meredith,
The site worked for me, and I have spent quite a bit of time there. Thanks so much for pointing me to such a handy tool.
Would you please write a entry on picking a house that is priced below comparable houses in the neighborhood? I am looking but feel my search is not as effective as it could be. Connie