Lowering my own house’s value

Zillow is a neat idea — personally I’ve found their values a bit flaky, but it’s still a worthwhile concept.

I just plugged in my own address; on a whim, I wanted to see if my house has accumulated any value since I bought it. Low and behold — it has! According to Zillow, the price has gone up almost 10% since I bought it! Admittedly, Zillow’s estimated value is still lower than what I paid for the house, but now…

I just checked the most recent sales data for the house — aka, when I bought it.

I pulled down my own house’s value. The way the sale was written up for the seller, there were actually two separate deals. Half of what I paid went to the woman, half went to the estate of the husband. Which means there were two simultaneous sale contracts, each half of what I actually paid for the house. Guess what! That lowers the value of the house, as it’s now considered to have sold at that 50% mark. DOH!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

  1. David G says:

    Hi, it’s David from Zillow.
    This is a odd case. Could you e-mail me your address so that I can investigate further? [davidg at zillow]