Search the Phoenix MLS

Welcome to the Phoenix Real Estate Guy weblog! We're a blog about -- brace yourself -- Phoenix real estate. But there is much more here... national real estate happenings, and the occasional off-topic musings. Enjoy your stay!
Search the Phoenix MLS - No Registration Required!

Recent Posts

Our Brokerage

Nov

2006

Yet Another Auto Valuation Method

Posted by Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy as Real Estate Tech Stuff

There’s a new AVM on the block. Cyberhomes.com from Fidelity is the latest entrant into the fray. It is of course “Beta”. Everything even remotely new seems to be tagged beta. Beta is cool I guess.

They proclaim to have valuations for 100 million homes. I didn’t count them all, so I’ll take their word for it. It is significantly more than 67M the older, more established (yet still Beta) Zillow claims to hold.

So does it work? Sure, sort of. About like any other AVM out there. I checked my house on three of these things, here’s what they said:

Cyberhomes: $392,139. Range:$352,925 - $450,960
Zillow: $395,090. Range: $343,728 - $438,550
RealEstateABC: $392,000 (I couldn’t find a range)

Despite these three each having “proprietary formulas” to determine home value, they all returned remarkably close values. I suspect that’s because they all obviously use the same data. I say “obviously” because each of these three AVMs had either “N/A” or “-” for the number of bedrooms. (I assure you that my home has bedrooms), and each had virtually the same incorrect number of bathrooms (interestingly, one said I had 2 and 2/3’s baths. I’ve never seen a 2/3’s bath). And each had my lot size with identical (albeit incorrect) square footage. They all pulled the same comps as well, missing of course the two most recent comps from just down the street (comps that put the value of our home at closer to $415K)

I will say this about Cyberhomes.com. It had the clearest aerial image of my house of all three. For what that’s worth.

I’m not a big fan of AVMs. I’m not an enemy of them either. Nor am I afraid of them like a lot of agents are. They are what they are. They are chunks of code attempting to place a subjective value on an item. They can’t see the item. They can’t hear the neighbors dog barking, they don’t know just how great the view is. They don’t know all the subtle neighborhood amenities. They don’t know about the red wine stain on the carpet or the body in the closet. They are what they are — a single piece of data in the complex process of home valuation.

Technorati Tags: cyberhomes, zillow, realestateABC, AVM, automatic valuation method

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to this blog via email or RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Potentially Related Posts on Phoenix Real Estate Guy:

In the Eyes of the Arizona Board of Appraisal, Zillow Stands Alone

Clear the Phoenix Roads!

Howling FOR Zillow…

14 Responses

Robert Melton

November 10th, 2006 at 7:45 am
1

At least they have come up with a consistent value for you. I pulled the valuations for 10 homes that are in the Pittsburgh area (currently on the market), and they weren’t anywhere near as close as yours.

The other thing I found in my search of about 20 homes was that, at least where I was looking, Zillow was more likely to have a value than Cyberhomes.

Small sample, but it was interesting to see nonetheless.
jf.sellsius

November 10th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
2

Interesting. I agree with you that AVMs are what they are, good, bad or so-so. Whether a human appraiser, broker or computer gives a value, that value does NOT sell your home. It is just the beginning of the long process to complete the transaction. People do all the real work.
Pat Kitano

November 11th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
3

Good analysis… I think Fidelity just counted the # of homes in their title database and just said 100,000,000 homes for dramatic effect.

As far as I can tell, all the AVMs are using county recorder’s data as their foundation and building algorithms on top of the data. I would assume a statistician can do a correlational analysis on top of Zillow and Cyberhomes and find it is close to 100%. I checked Cyberhomes against my Fidelity online title database account and do note that the data seems the same.

Any company can slap together an AVM now… I find it more interesting to understand the strategy behind an AVM… I did a strategy analysis on Cyberhomes at my blog.
Pat Kitano

November 11th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
4

(Hi Jay, not sure if it’s me or what, but I had a tough time leaving a comment for you… I might be getting locked out with this message:

Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!)

Hope you’ve been receiving my comments!

–pk
Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

November 11th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
5

Sorry about that Pat. The original comment was held in moderation. I’ve been getting hammered lately with comment spam, so I tweaked my spam catcher a little (and maybe a little too much). It’s a fine balance between allowing the good guys to comment freely and letting the knucklehead spammers through…

*Great* analysis of Cyberhomes over on TransparentRE!!
Jim Sims

November 12th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
6

I tried all three, zillow, realestateabc, and cyberhomes on a property in CA. Only zillow had any data. The others put up garbage. This is a new area but it is about 4 years old so I guess that the two that couldn’t find the location are using very old data.
Mark

November 13th, 2006 at 10:50 am
7

RealEstateABC was the only one that works with Safari (MAC). The prices for my two former houses seemed sage. Maybe a little high but then I’m a pessimist. No data on the new house.
Doug Quance

November 13th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
8

I think some of these AVM’s are getting info from the MLS, as well as the county tax records.

We have two MLS’s in Atlanta, and when an agent on my team sold her house, she must have mistakenly entered an incorrect amount in the sales price field. ($210K instead of $442K) I caught the error, and had her go in and fix it. Well some AVM’s are showing both prices (for the same day) so I don’t think they got that info from the tax records, as those records were always correct.

Zillow doesn’t have the tax records (even though the transaction closed in February) and shows a market value of $252K.

I tried realestateabc, but their system kept timing out for me.

I, for one, am not threatened in the least by these AVM’s. If nothing else, I think they prove that it takes more than a computer and an Internet connection to place a value on a piece of real estate.
Doug Quance

November 13th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
9

Correction to my previous post:

The agent on my team apparently recorded the wrong sales price in ONE of the MLS’s, but the other was correct. (We still don’t understand how that happened… but it did)
Norm Fisher

November 14th, 2006 at 8:53 am
10

One has to wonder what value these tools really possess when the “range of value” is $100,000 wide. What can a homeowner get from this, other than confused?
Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

November 15th, 2006 at 12:38 am
11

As all are reporting here, the variation and accuracy of these AVMs seems to range from “OK” to horrific. But even if you’re a seller in an area were the estimates are “OK”, so what? Would you really want to set your listing price at the “OK” value, or the right value?

Interesting places to look around. Some have some pretty cool data available to ponder. But setting an accurate home value? I think not.
Carol Williams

November 15th, 2006 at 6:48 am
12

Hi Jay,
I’m over from Active Rain to check out your blog. Good stuff here. These AVMs are an interesting phenomenon but hardly a replacement for the expertise of an agent who is in the marketplace every day. Like you said, they don’t see the view, hear the dog bark… blah, blah, blah.

Reminds me of trying to price a home based on assessed value, which is almost always low in our market. Sometimes very low. And, at least, the assessor (or their rep) gets out to actually see the outside of your home once every couple of years. Very few sellers want to price their home based on assesed value. Why would they want to use an AVM that is basically some mathematical formula in a machine in some far away place?

Keep up the good work on your blog.
Lewis

December 20th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
13

I like what you are saying about all the web sites,I just can’t get a feel on what my house is worth. With Zillow they say 506,000,Real Estate ABC 406,000, Ditech.com 465,000,Cyberhomes 704,000,Reply.com 491,000. These prices all look good but when we had our house appraised it came back at a great price of 330,000. So it hard to beleave any of these sites.
Suzi

November 9th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
14

Realquest.com is another interesting AV site. One of my sellers called directly as soon as we looked up her home (I, like their map and aerial:-) She was not happy–Just think if independent buyers out there think these are true home value…