Zillow Launches City Real Estate Reports

I enjoyed getting my first Monthly Real Estate Report for Arroyo Grande from Zillow today. I guess that in today’s market, enjoy may be a stretch as the market seems to still be going down.

The features of the report are straightforward. There is a sentence that says, “According to Zillow’s Real Estate Market Reports for {current date}, {city name} values were {up or down} {percentage rate} compared to {last month} and {up or down} {percentage rate} compared to {same month last year}.

Here is mine:

You can see the call to action is to Share Arroyo Grande Values and Knowledge. This opens up a page on Zillow that shows their data over time for this city. Sadly, it is really more of a history of initially poor data quality at Zillow in 2007 but improving as they have aggregated more and more data. Their 2009 and 2010 numbers are really not very far off if you look at transactional data – listings and sales. The reason for the drop is that the volume of luxury home sales in this market is down by more than 60%. Luxury home owners usually choose not to sell assets when the market is weak.

Recent Transactions – Zillow also provides a call to action to view recent transactions. I like this feature because it shows me the comps that were used in their calculations. Another key feature about Zillow that I really like is their level of transparency about the accuracy of their Zestimates. They do not hide anything.

As you can see in the enclosed graph – the Zestimates were pretty far off of the transaction prices in many of the recent transactions. But I give them props for displaying the accuracy – a covenant that they have always maintained.

If you would like to learn more about Zillow, please click here.

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