Blogsberger's Box

My headline comes from John Burns Consulting, a national firm providing custom consulting services to homebuilders and others.

The current link to his full commentary is here.

He makes points I've noted before, and include in my appraisals every time I reference Zillow data, and less frequently when I've used the Case Shiller data:

1. Zillow and other AVM (automated valuation models) are not able to factor in important attributes (e.g. condition, what's across the street) of a specific property, so unless your home is "average" in every key aspect, be careful.  But, Zillow and the AVMs provide excellent statistics for the important things that are 'average' in a neighborhood:

  a.  price movements from period to period in a neighborhood -i.e.  is the market 'going up', 'going down', or 'stable'.

  b.  how does one neighborhood (or zip code, or city) compare to another in average prices of homes.

2. Case Shiller and other sequential sales models are driven by 'what's currently selling' - not a representative sample of the entire market.