The Zestimate that appears on every listing on Zillow is about to get a little closer to the expected sales price of a house, and all the online real estate giant had to do is give away more than $1 million.
Beyond that, Zillow also awarded $100,000 to the second-place team, and $50,000 to the third-place team.
But Zillow is hardly chalking this exercise up as a loss. Just the opposite, in fact.
Zillow said that it will incorporate parts of the winning team’s model, along with other contest entries, to improve the accuracy of the Zestimate that appears on the listings for 110 million homes on Zillow.
According to Zillow, the improvements to the Zestimate will decrease its current nationwide error rate of 4.5% to less than 4%, meaning that half of all Zestimates will be within 4% of the selling price, and half will be off by more than 4%.
Put another way, Zillow claims that on average, the Zestimate is $10,000 off of the actual sale price for a typical home, but with the improvements from the contest, future Zestimates could be approximately $1,300 closer to the sale price.
The Zestimate has long served as a contentious issue between real estate professionals and consumers.
…continue reading the rest of this post: Zillow awards $1 million prize for making Zestimates more accurate
