I believe Zillow is a great platform for real estate, but what most people don't know is that there is a margin of error on Zillow Zestimate, and the level of accuracy varies by your location. In the Zillow print screen image below for South Carolina counties, you can see the star ratings for each county. According the Zestimate Accuracy Table below, a star rating of 4 represents Best Zestimate, a star rating of 3 represents Good Zestimate, 2 represents Fair Zestimate. One star represents Tax Assessor's Value, or that Zillow was unable to compute Zestimate accuracy, and zero stars means No Valuation. These star ratings are tied to the median error in an area.
In the Zestimate Accuracy table above, I have highlighted the information for Greenville SC Real Estate. As you can see in the image, Greenville County has a Best Zestimate star rating. For the Greenville County properties on Zillow, 99% of them have data like number of bedroom, bathrooms, etc. available on Zillow. 99% of the Greenville County SC homes on Zillow have Zestimates, and they only calculate these Zestimates where they have certain data, which includes trasaction details. The next column shows that in Greenville County 26% of the time, the Zestimate was within 5% of the selling price. The next shows that 47% of the time, the Zestimate was within 10% of the selling price. The next column shows that in Greenville County, 71% of the time, the Zestimate was within 20% of the selling price. The median error is 10.8%, which means that the Zestimate for half of the homes in Greenville County are within 10.8% of the selling price, and half are off by more that 10.8%.
The table above was last updated on January 11th 2011, and is computed for the three month period ending on September 30th 2010.
If you are interested in selling your home, relying on these Zestimates could result in you having an overpriced listing out there, which can cause you to loose that perfect buyer, and cause your home to sit longer on the market than it should. It may also cause you to leave money on the table. Be sure to consult a good listing agent in your area who can put together a detailed Highest Home Price Analysis that's based on the condition of your home, and the market conditions in your neighborhood.
Are you interested in selling your home in the Greater Greenville area? Contact Victor at 864-438-5050 for an up-to-date Highest Price Analysis.
To find out the Zestimate accuracy for your area, simple visit zillow.com and click on the gray link on the bottom shown on the image below.