Looking up the estimated value of any property on Zillow is great. The site just doesn’t replace a good real estate agent, though.
Amy Hoak of MarketWatch writes that Zillow’s CEO, Spencer Rascoff, said that the site was meant to give consumers more access to home-value information. It’s not to put real estate agents out of business, as Hotwire and others did to the travel agency industry.
“We call it a Zestimate and not a zeppraisal and not a zeprice. It’s meant to be a starting point,” Rascoff said. “To determine a more accurate opinion of a home’s value you should hire a real estate agent, or more to the point, you should sell the house and then you will know how much it’s worth.”
Rascoff sold a Seattle investment property for $1.1 million earlier this year. The Zestimate indicated that it was worth $1.7 million.
