Why Online Home Values Can Differ by 30% or More

Have you ever wondered why, depending on what online home valuation tool you're using, your numbers can be so different? And, you know, to give you an example, I was talking with somebody that called a few nights ago. They've got their house listed with somebody else, and of course I can't help them much, but they were just asking me, and if they call me and ask me, I can answer some questions. And I told them that, you know, they asked me about their house price, and I said, Well, I mean, I think your house is tremendously overpriced, and you came on the market way overpriced. And, you know, I gave her a demonstration, like for instance, when you look at Zillow, which is just one of many, many of what they call AVMs, which is automatic valuation tools online that creates values, and different banks and different lenders and different insurance companies use them for different reasons. And you really have to take them for a grain of salt because they haven't seen your house. They don't know the unique details about your house. They don't know anything about the upgrades. They don't know anything about the additions. They just don't know. And it's just so magical and interesting how a house in, let's just call it May, can go from a Zillow value, a Zestimate value of $360,000, and the people decide to list it for, let's just call it $550,000. All of a sudden, within like three days, the Zestimate jumps to very close to five hundred and some thousand dollars. And then an awful lot of the other ones jump it. So I decided to take a tool that a friend of mine has been building and we've been working on, and we've kind of put it on pause just because we were going to, you know, build it, sell it as a SaaS platform and, you know, sell it for money to somebody to hopefully buy it. But what we realized is there's so many systems out there that are giving home values and so many different agents and everything else asking customers, Hey, you want to see your home value? So we could collect their data and get their information and call them and hopefully talk them into listing their house with us. Well, I said, Okay, well, I'm just curious, you know, let's just take some of the major portals and what do they look like? What does it look like? What does the spread look like? So what we did is we took, since it was doing nothing else, we're not monetizing it, we're not selling it, we're not doing advertising on it, we're not renting it out, pretty much other than a couple of friends of mine that I'm letting use it, and one's in Sarasota and one is in Tennessee—and I'm sorry, Texas—and because they were interested and they use our content building system that we built for a website provider that we commonly use, that we had hoped that we could integrate with, but they decided to go with a different company, which is okay. We get that. And I think there's going to be In the real estate industry and a lot of industries, with all the AI and everybody doing all these different tools, and I mean, you can create some stuff. I mean, for the last probably three weeks, I've gone down a rabbit hole of creating some really incredible tools. But, you know, my wife had to sit me down and kind of do a realistic look because she was right. I was spending so much time building all these tools, I wasn't doing my job of, A, taking care of my customers. And keep in mind, I'm a real estate team leader, and I have three customers. I have buyers, I have sellers, and I have agents. And, you know, my job is to be communicating with them, helping them sell their houses, helping them buy a house, and mostly helping them navigate the market conditions that we're in. You'll saw a blog post that I created about an Anaconda market, which has actually come from a podcast that I heard from Brian Buffini. And you can see it on my website. You can see it in previous posts, and it's worth a listen to. I don't care if you're where you're at in the market, whether you're in the business or not in the business, because I think it's true. But, so we go at it and, you know, this is kind of the last thing I did because we're not doing anything else with this website, so I just put it on it. And all of a sudden, I don't know why, I don't know how, but we're getting dozens and dozens of ChatGPT and Claude people from those websites come in and type their home addresses so they can see the different valuations. We're not spending money, we're not running ads, we're not even marketing it. This is the only thing I've done to even talk about it. People don't know it's there, and it's actually part of the system we built to build some very deep SEO. EOA, IO, and all the schemas and JSONs and everything else that go into what it takes to get organic leads. Because we've all come to the, well, most of us have kind of hit the reality that Zillow and Google have such a tight relationship that, you know, as real estate agents, it's really difficult for us to, you know, get potential buyers or sellers off Google anymore. Because no matter what we do, Zillow has got it. You know, they're outspending us. They got more money. There's nothing we can do about it. And so they're going to get the, you know, 50, 60 percent of the cream of the crop. And no denying it, love or hate them, that's where the buyers are looking at houses. So what we said is, okay, we're not going to sell this thing. You know, pipe dream is you build this system, SaaS platform, you get a bunch of people to sign up, paying you hundreds of dollars a month, you get a revenue stream built, and then you sell it, and then you, you know, you move on. I've had one success story where I did that to some level, not enough to quit work over, certainly, to a friend of mine. And I've been involved with other real estate CRM and website platforms as one of their, you know, beta testers and help them kind of develop and give them some ideas on what we need because I'm in the trenches. You know, I still list and sell houses. I'm involved in hard transactions every day, and in today's market, everything's hard. It's about life change. It's divorce. It's people dying. It's people moving to be closer to kids or kids moving closer to parents or grandparents to take care of each other. Multigenerational, job losses, job transfers. It's just all kinds of things going on. It's such a weird market. But I've been doing it for 28 years, so anyway, I want to get back to the site. I want you to take a look at it because it is crazy. You enter your address, and it's going to pull up the automatic valuations on up to 12 if it'll pull it. Some of them it won't pull. In some areas, we don't have the access to the data because of the way they block it. Some areas we do. It uses a lot of public record data. It uses a lot of different systems, but it includes Zillow and Realtor.com and a lot of the major portals out there. But I think it's 12 maximum, but you'll probably see somewhere between 8 and 12. And you can see variances in these models of 30, 40 percent in prices. And it is scary to think that people are actually pricing their house based on these things. When you price your house, you need to be talking to a real estate agent that is—now, I'm going to say this, and no offense against new agents, but no brand new agents have very little business listing houses, in my opinion, because this is a market where it is hard and it takes a lot of experience to get through deals and get them closed. And usually that means you've messed up many times in the past and you've learned from it. And I don't mean disrespect, but this is just not that kind of market. And so you need to get with that. Or if you don't want to trust a real estate agent and you want to go it alone, go for sale by owner, do whatever you want to do, you know, get an appraiser. I think you're going to be shocked because most sellers don't understand what's really going on in the market. I mean, this year, and you can read it, you can listen to it in the podcast, this year there's going to be 4 million home sales in the United States, roughly. That's the least amount since 1995. And think about it, there is 80 million more people in the country. So we've never—I usually, when the market goes down, I thrive in my business because we offer a guaranteed sale program where we'll actually buy your house if we don't sell it for a certain price. And that price, you know, quite honestly, is a price that I can buy it for, clean it up, fix it up, flip it and sell it and make a profit. If you can't do it yourself, but we recommend you put it on the market retail and do the fix-ups yourself, or sometimes we even loan you the money and then get paid back at closing to fix it up yourself to help you out. But usually, when you have a market that slows down, I mean, I've been doing this a long time, I'll carry 50 to 150 listings. I mean, we're lucky to get more than six or eight or 10 listed right now because people are rate locked. They're sitting on low rates. They can't afford to leave their rates. So all you've got now, like in our area, is mostly national home builders. They're all in-house. They won't list with agents, so they got their own teams. So that kind of leaves us out doing different things. So we're having to work a lot harder. But really, the reason I wanted to have this conversation, I want you to take a look at this site. It's freehousevalue.com. It is something I threw together, vibe coding it's called. It's AI coding using all four different AI engines. A friend of mine had been building a much deeper system, but the market conditions just wasn't right for it to go any further. And the data feeds that it costs to maintain it aren't right. But, you know, we'll see what happens down the road. We'll see, because it's a great domain. It's a very expensive domain, freehousevalue.com. And if somebody really wants it, I'll sell it, and I'll split it with my friend and my partner on that. But, you know, right now we're just using it to kind of show people to be very careful. And I'm not demeaning these systems. I just want people to see the crazy swings. I mean, it is crazy. Try it out. You got no worries about getting beat to death. You can try it out, test it out, let me know what you think. We're not going to hammer you over the head. And you can try it anywhere in the country. It works everywhere. So just go to freehousevalue.com and give me some feedback on it. So thanks a lot.

🎙️ Real Stories with Buddy Blake — Episode Why Online Home Values Can Differ by 30% or More A homeowner’s online estimate appeared to jump after the property was listed far above its earlier value. Here is why automated valuations can disagree—and why sellers should never let one algorithm set their asking price. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ About Your Host Buddy Blake, Buddy Blake Real Estate 📍 Wilmington, NC 📞 (910) 395-1000 ✉️ buddy@buddyblake.com 📱 Follow & Connect: • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@buddyblakenc • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buddyblakedotcom 📎 Resources & Links 📖 Read the full blog post: https://www.buddytheblogger.com/r/VksGFcXW 🌐 Website: https://buddyblake.com 💼 Free Home Value - No Registration Rquired: https://expresshomesale.com ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🏠 FREE HOME VALUE ESTIMATE Curious what your home is worth? Get a free instant estimate. https://www.expresshomesale.com/sell 📊 COST OF WAITING CALCULATOR See what waiting could cost you — the real numbers. https://expresshomesale.com ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚖️ Equal Housing Opportunity Powered by https://buddyblake.com 🚀 Amplify YOUR content with AI — Learn more at https://reiosai.com