Anyone notice the value of your house has begun to creep back upwards?

Not huge gains but at least they are not going down anymore and many are beginning to go back up slowly. Here, check your home value. Or your neighbors?

http://www.zillow.com/

did I notice that my house was creeping upwards... "house rapture" was my next thought. Maybe more coffee is in order this morning.

the county had to reassess our home value down (and loads of other folks as well) so they raised property tax rate in an attempt to balance the budget...

I bought a condo in Austin that I'm renting to my son (he's a grad student there). I can't believe how inexpensively I got into it compared to what it would have been a couple of years ago.

...The "shadow inventory." DoctorHousingBubble.com.

The nutshell: banks are keeping foreclosed homes off the market. Foreclosing on them, taking possession and what-not, but not turning around and selling them. A LOT of them, according to this guy's numbers.

That keeps a lot of cheap real estate from being sold, which keeps comps higher, which helps home values on sites like Zillow. :hi:

The catch 22 is the values have gone back up in "desireable" areas but the pool of buyers haven't. Part of this game is pressure from municipalities that took the biggest hit by the real estate bust...losing billions in property and retail taxes over the past 2 years. I suspect some of this creep is an attempt to quietly prop up the tax bases.

It didn't even get the right house and the property values were all over the damn place while I know that the entire neighborhood is very similar.

Not blaming you personally but I don't think that's a very good resource.

In my neighborhood it lists a house that sold for almost 3 times less than the zEstimate price. Another neighbor has had his house on the market for months listed for less than the zEstimate with nobody biting. The zEstimate for my house is nearly twice what I paid for it a year and a half ago. Moreover, it values my house quite a bit higher than my neighbor's even though by just about any standard one could think of, his house is much nicer.

I'll grant that Zillow is a nifty tool to see what houses sold for and are being listed at though.

Zillow is the first to admit that. The estimate is closer to market price when there's been a lot of sales in the area and not very good when there's been little activity. After a house on my block sold for 60% of the prior sale price the Zestimates for the whole block dropped dramatically. In the year since then there have been no other sales and the Zestimates have been adjusted upward by about 15%, which is about right based on the sales in the neighborhood.

Still, the estimate for my house compared to the abutters is overly generous. I think that's because Zillow adjusts value based on the types of permits pulled -- we have a new roof, for example. I know for a fact that a realtor would value our house at a lower price than two of the abutters because I've been inside those houses and they're in much better condition ("updated" kitchens, hardwood floors, etc.) and one has more traditional lawn-based landscaping.




eta to answer the OP's question: no, the values aren't moving up here. We're still in a trough.

The house on my block sold for 3 times less than the zEstimate, but there appears to have been no adjustment to the estimates for other houses on the block. Looking at houses that have sold around the immediate area, most of them sold at 10-20% below the Zillow estimate.

I can see how my neck of the woods might be tricky for a computer algorithm to assign value: it's in the fringe between a very nice area and a war zone, so perceptions of public safety vary quite a bit within a few blocks. Most of the houses are 70-80 years old, and there's wide variation in their upkeep. Moreover, Kansas City has one of the highest rates of vacant houses in the country. So it's a pretty funky market. Nevertheless that doesn't excuse systematically overvaluing houses, which is what they're doing.

I have a vague recollection that the site founder said that in some states all sorts of related data is available in real time and it makes the estimation more precise, whereas in other areas it's much hard to access the info.

It'd be fun to hear them respond to your observation. Now that they're trying to be a go-to site for people looking to buy it would be in their best interest to hone the estimation technique.

In 5 of 6 houses that have sold on my block in the last couple of years, it lists the sale date but has the following disclaimer:

"This transaction was not used in computing the Zestimate for this house. When our computer models detect data patterns that suggest particular transactions are not closely correlated to actual value, we exclude them. These patterns can include unusual document or transaction types, sales between possibly related parties, and unusually high or low transaction prices."

I know for a fact that for 4 of these houses the sale price was considerably lower than the estimate, and I'm pretty sure it's the case in the fifth, but I'm too lazy to look up the county records. So their model is kind of like a creationist who has an idealized belief in the way things are and then willfully chooses to ignore evidence that contradicts this belief. It makes sense to throw out an outlier so that it doesn't screw up the model, but five outliers on a single block aren't outliers, they're a pattern the model should be recognizing.

I'd be interested to hear what they say too, but I can't find a "contact us" link.

if they extend it to anyone - then the speculators will be back and outbidding normal people for homes and prices will bubble again and the whole deck of cards will have to fold again

How would I do that?

I know my next door neighbors, 6 acres over, just put their house on the market for a hefty sum. About the same as the people around the corner did right as the bubble was bursting; it never sold.

Of course, their places are worth twice mine.

Oh, they tell us we have hit bottom, but so far that has not been correct.

Homes in my part of San Diego have stopped dropping in value. The bubble was most severe in traditionally low-value areas like southeast SD.

they have yet to rebound. Though the drop is slow. Just had some work to my house that required we know its value. Very high end houses are still dropping, also.

last year.

It's almost back up to where it was before the drop, though.


Of course, I do realize that the "value" means almost nothing. It's what people would be willing to pay that counts.

house for just about ANY price, let alone what they need to get to payoff their mortgage and the realtor.

It's still worth more than three times what I paid for it.

for this to work for me.

That seems to have only happened in places where home values outpaced the rate of inflation, or where unemployment has outpaced the average.