Newsflash! I have found the ultimate nosy neighbor tool. For anyone who wants to get a fairly accurate idea of what their home is worth (or their sisters, brothers, mothers, neighbors, bosses, co workers, ex boyfriends, that girl you can’t stand… you get the idea) without having to interact with, my gosh, a Realtor, check out www.zillow.com.
This is the first valuation site I’ve seen that is actually, reasonably accurate. And they don’t require a bunch of personal information from you up front to use their service (FYI, such info is typically sold to Realtors at $30 a pop or for 25-35% referral fees on closed transactions).
You simply type in the address of the property you want to know about and go. The result? A cool satellite picture of the subject property with parcel divisions and the estimated values of all the other properties around it. It’s totally addicting.
I checked out the values of every house I ever owned in Nevada and California. (Painful… I should have kept them all!) The only place Zillow seemed to falter was on our current house, which is too new to show accurate data (the satellite picture didn’t even have the roads cut in). Also, Zillow execs admit that their Zestimates, as they call them, are most accurate on the middle range homes. The very high end and low end homes are more difficult to get right. But all-in-all, a fabulous online resource.
