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Beyond What’s Your Home Worth: The 7 Most Innovative AVM Applications
RICHARD LOMBARDI COO, ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
inaccurate calculation of property value. Zillow even now acknowledges that the Zestimate is just “a starting point in determining a home’s value and not an official appraisal.” There’s no doubt that, especially early on, the Zestimate’s primary purpose was to drive traffic to the website, not to provide a highly accurate home value.
Although AVMs had been around long before Zillow, the Zestimate was the first widely successful consumer- facing application of the AVM, which calculates the estimated market value of a property at a given point in time based on a mathematical model that typically relies on recent nearby sales of similar homes, among other factors.
Fourteen years ago, Zillow introduced the consumer world to the Automated Valuation Model (AVM). Zillow called it a Zestimate, a name that received its share of ribbing but also was effective in catching the attention of consumers, eventually drawing hundreds of millions of prospective homebuyer and seller eyeballs to the Zillow website and generating myriad leads for real estate agents.
From the outset, the Zestimate received plenty of flack for its often-
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DEC 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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