Quote from Banjo:
zillow is a sart. It will go thru the phases of brokers fear then realizing that it helps them as people can scout areas they are completety ignorant of and so on. It's considerably off on my house ( 17%) but the criterion is very general and only a base from which to build. It will take a broker to be property specific and show. All in it's a good thing and will generate business imo. The # of hits checking on family and friends houses must be enormous.
Quote from sirpangolin:
It should be illegal to see what other people paid for their house.
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Quote from sirpangolin:
It should be illegal to see what other people paid for their house.
It's not anybody's business what I paid for my house. Period. You should have to be a fully licensed appraiser to get that kind of data OR you should have to pay a pretty good fee to get this data at your local courthouse -- not just any old Tom, Dick, or Harry that wants to get into the appraisal business or who is nosey.
Anyone can appraise. Look up comps and assign a value -- there's your appraisal.
I've actually considered writing my state representative about how this is a violation of my privacy.
I grew up in the Midwest (I now live in California) and if you asked someone what they paid for their home, it would be considered very very rude.
It may be common discussion over at ye ole' water cooler in California, but in most of the country it's considered being all up in someone's kool aid...
Quote from realestatetimer:
Let's call a spade a spade.
This is a site designed to sell advertising, not provide accurate "real time" pricing data.
Using this site to make informed real estate decisions would be like using yesterday's price bars to make day-trading decisions today.
Robert Campbell
Quote from Banjo:
It's all public record. .... if it's on a hard drive storage system somewhere it can be had for a price, legal or not.
Quote from CoolTrader:
Marketwatch did a interview with Zillow's founder. If his dream would come true, we might pay as less commission in real estate as buying stocks online. It doesn't make sense to me to pay a high commission even for a new home.