Is Redfin seriously misleading the market?
Most home buyers/sellers use Redfin/Zillow as pricing tool especially in metropolitans in NYC SEA or Bay Area. Base on my months of months of monitoring, I found Redfins estimation algorithm/prediction has the following pattern: 1. Has “page views” as part of the parameters. Yes if you write a bot to visit your home address everyday from various IPs, your home estimate will go way more than your neighbors! 2. Unless there are dramatic fell in the market, if the market is cooled down and the current estimation went down, they will curve the estimation in the past to fake a smooth increase in estimation. This way you always see a steady increase for the past. Yes, last years estimations do not stay, it can still change. So if you bought a house last year and if this years market is not that good, the estimation you see now of the date you bought will be lower than the estimation you saw when you bought the house. Is there any legal issue if they alter past estimations? Other Thoughts?
Redfin should go out of business. Their agents are utterly incompetent and their tools do exactly what you say.
Redfin has much better estimates than Zillow.
Care to say more? What observations have you made? Your home, your zip code, your county, nationwide? Buyers and sellers have different biases, so more details would help.
In my observation, Redfin’s estimates are closer to the market price than Zillows’. Zillow’s estimate is frequently higher that Redfin’s estimate.
I don’t believe their estimate , they manipulated the result heavily
Redfin makes money when the homes on their site sell. That should tell you all you need to know about these "features" aka marketing.
Everyone who is commenting, please state whether you're a buyer, or a seller, or an owner tracking their net worth through estimates.
Isn't word "ESTIMATE" says it all? Your estimate for a 🏠 is bound to be different than the way I calculat estimates for the same 🏠. If you don't agree with someone's estimate then either give suggestions to improve or don't use their estimates or add/sub Delta to their estimate for your need.
Historical estimate is the puzzling part. They invalidates their own past estimation and change it to make the graph look smooth.
Redfin retroactively changes all their price estimates and retains no history. Example, in May, Redfin said my house was worth $860 in May. Today, it says my house was worth $802 in May, but is worth $808 today. This is called “smoothing.” Redfin doesn’t want to create the appearance of a downward trend in the Seattle market, even though that is exactly what is happening. So instead they are laundering reality and deliberately misleading homebuyers into thinking we are still in an upward price appreciation by re-writing historical Redfin estimates, to “smooth” the trend lines so that to a neutral observer it looks like continued steady growth. They smoothed out all volatility. I do not mind that they use an estimate. I mind that they opaquely change an historical estimate and do not retain what the estimate was at that point in time or disclose why the historical estimates changed. It feels very manipulative, like false advertising, and should not be legal.
The Redfin estimate is a joke. I used to have a condo and the value of the identical condos in the building varied by +/- 15%. They also clearly use the list price in their calculation which completely invalidates their estimate as a data point. They also seem to inflate the estimate for their own listings. I listed with them and my own estimate inflated by $50k the day the listing went live and dropped back down the day I pulled the listing.
Totally agreed to 2. I felt it is weird that estimate graph does not conform to what they showed before. I have a feeling that the two teams own each and they didn’t talk about this or perhaps intentional with political motivation.
Yup that is possible and that was what political motivation was about.
Not impressed with their “hot home” feature line that says that this home will /could/expect to sell soon. Feels like artificial urgency. In reality I checked a few ones, majority of them hadn’t sold.