Incremental movement toward a blanket Zillow.com disclaimer?
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Friday, September 8th, 2006, 7:46 pm MST
Category: Blogging, Disintermediation, Marketing, Real Estate, Zillow.com
Today brings a game effort by David Gibbons of Zillow Blog to address Zillow.com’s disclosure/disclaimer issue. The problem for me is that the material he cites is at least one click deeper than where he puts is and two clicks deeper than where it should be. Even worse, the page he cites makes even more extravagant indefensible claims than does the Zillow.com home page.
This much, snipped together from David’s text
A Zestimate is really a starting point in figuring out the true value of a house. A Zestimate is not an appraisal.
would be perfectly adequate — if it were placed prominently on the Zillow.com home page and any page from which a Zestimate can be run. Of course, the extravagant claims would need a pruning, too…
But: This is incremental progress, movement in the right direction. Good on ya’, David!
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Related posts:4 Comments so far
So what’s the story behind the disclaimer? Were people taking those online estimates a bit too seriously? I didn’t realize this type of problem would come up. I mean, how could a site like that possibly give a *legitimate* estimate of a home’s value just from satellite photos and neighborhood data? Sure, they’d be in the ballpark, but not exactly close!
> So what’s the story behind the disclaimer?
Zillow.com loudly proclaims its prowess while quietly admitting its limitations. People do treat it as gospel, even though, as you say, they should know better. Even with a disclaimer, many people will still behave like fools. But they will not have been fooled into doing so.
[...] AVMs are exempt from appraisal standards but Zillow is not conspicuous in disclaiming its nonappraisal methods. Seems we, and a certain bloodhound, were not the only ones upset over this. Will Zillow be required to post a conspicuous non-appraisal disclaimer on its Home Page and beside each zestimate? Only time and the FTC will tell. [...]
[...] After reading this Bloodhound Blog post, we started sniffing around ourselves to discover whether Zillow.com would be legally required to disclose, conspicuously on each zestimate and its home page, the same language some states require on the first page of each CMA, to wit, that “the analysis was not done in accordance with uniform standards of accepted professional appraisal practice“. [...]