Hating on Zillow

I'm at war with Zillow.com, the real estate website, that among other things, provides estimates of home values.

Yes, I know that home prices have fallen considerably over the last few years and I also accept being a sucker for buying during the height of the housing bubble. But, Zillow? Totally not being fair.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the site, trying to do some research for possibly refinancing our mortgage. I hadn't checked our home value estimate in some time. I plugged in our address and BAM - right in the eyes- a number I can only describe as ugly and wrong. It was lower than the price we paid, of course, but, worse, when I happened to check our neighbor's house (identical house built at the same exact time; we closed within weeks of each other), it was SIGNIFICANTLY higher. I mean, almost 100K higher. What???

I realized there were some missing variables in our home details section, so I edited those fields, plugging in the correct number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, etc, SURE that this would fix the bug. The site recalculates the estimate based on some "proprietary formula" every so often. The next time, I checked: our home value was LOWER. Our neighbor's? The same lofty number as before. My brows further furrowed.

Now, determined, I looked at all the edits our neighbors made: number of rooms, parking spaces, etc, and made sure our edits were the same. We've both made improvements to our backyard to a similar degree and our houses otherwise are comparable. It's not like our house overlooks the garbage dump and theirs a scenic mountain vista.

The next time, I checked for an update: minimally higher. Frown lines. Muttering. Outrage.

I can understand if there are inaccuracies and variations depending on location, it's an imperfect science (the aerial map generated of our house, places our house in a parking lot along with four other houses), but what's up with two houses adjacent to one another, that are siamese twins, looking like perfect strangers? I don't know about this "proprietary formula," but it may be more along the lines of "close your eyes and point."

I tried to find somewhere on their site that I could give my feedback, you know, if they wanted to fine tune their process of estimation, but no luck. I can write to the site members in general, sounding like a sour grapes tool (kind of like I am right now), but I can't let anyone on the site itself know of this discrepancy. (Hello, Zillow! If you're reading this, please fix my home value estimate, OK, thanks!)

Anyway, if you're looking for your masochistic fix in this economic downturn, it can't be beat. Also, check your 401K's while your at it.

KC tries to minimize whining on her personal blog, Where's My Cape? This is an original DC Metro Moms Blog post.