If there was ever an industry that I thought would benefit from the internet, it’s real estate. These are data-heavy purchases that people want to really research before making a decision.

Still, we’ve bought and sold a few different properties over the last few years and it’s difficult to get a good sense of how to price a property without talking to an agent. We can’t help but compare their thoughts with online tools like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtors.com. I think these are helpful for an initial assessment – or even as an input to our annual net worth assessment.

Of course the media (and many Realtors) regularly warn us that these estimates are terribly inaccurate. They warn us off of even looking at them … but should they?

I’d say in our neighborhood, they’ve been pretty good. The house across the street from us is for sale right now and the asking price is almost exactly the Zillow estimate.

Nationwide, Zillow says they are +/- 3% on a property that’s on the market. They say they are +/- 8% on properties not on the market. (I’m not sure how they can even assess their estimate if the property isn’t on the market (?).

I’ve tracked the Zillow value of our house, rental property, and condo in the past, but haven’t looked at the other estimation tools until now. I thought I’d see how our properties look in each one.

For our primary house in MN, I see about a 8% / $88K difference between the highest (Realtors.com) and the lowest (Redfin) estimates. Zillow is closer to the highest than the lowest. That’s not bad, but I thought the estimates might be closer.

For our vacation condo in FL, the numbers are closer. The highest (Redfin) is 3% / $20K above the lowest (Realtor.com). Zillow again is in the middle, but closer to the top of the range of the two others. I would expect a condo to have a more accurate estimate than a house, since there are a lot of them and they go on & off the market often.

Our rental townhouse in MN only has an estimate on Zillow. It pegs it at 5% more than what we payed 2+ years ago. That seems about right. I’m not sure why the other two don’t provide any info. The property is listed on all three of services, but Redfin & Realtor.com simply list the value as “NA”.

Obviously your property is only worth what someone will pay for it, but none of the articles I read would scare me from continuing to use Zillow as “rough / initial estimate”. We’ve always used Realtors to help us with actual transactions, but would be surprised if their pricing was significantly higher or lower.

How do you value your real estate? Have your experiences with online estimates been good or bad? Why?

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