I laugh as I read about the idea of homeowners posting whether or not they think the value estimate is accurate. Every home-owner will say it's too low; everyone in the market to buy (myself included) will say prices are too high.

Keep up the good work. Cheers!

Yeah, you're probably right, Ron! At least the second part of my request has nothing to do with opinions.

Zillow values our property just a bit lower that I think it is worth. But this is probably because they have the wrong information (we have two full baths, not 1.5 as their site says). But overall I think the value is only off by about $5K. Zillow shows our value heading upward - 3.5% in the past year, 0.6% in the past 30 days.

For comparison purposes I took a look at our neighbor's property. I think Zillow is way off here. This house is just two doors down from ours. Their house was built the same year as ours and is the exact same layout as ours. The lot is 200 square feet bigger but the house lacks a garage which we do have. Yet, it's "Zestimate" is $52K more than ours. This doesn't even take into consideration that ours has far more updates than theirs.

Overall I have not found Zillow to be particularly useful to us in our house search (we are looking for a larger home in the same area that we are in now).

A lot of Zillows values comes from the the tax assessment and the square footage of the living space in the home. If zillow thinks your neighbors homes is larger from the assessment, then there value will be higher. Not all the assessments are accurate and thats where you tend to find the most problems.

Interestingly enough, the tax assessment for our neighbor's home is $43,000 less than ours. Again, I just don't think it is a great tool. I would feel for any buyer that purchased our neighbors home for the Zillow estimate (and I think they would agree!).

Lisa, what is the sq footage on the assessment page compared to your home and your neighbors

Mike, on the assessment page our neighbor's house is listed as 82 sq. ft. smaller than ours. This is enclosed living space. Not sure how to account for Zillow's value based on on this. Don't know if Zillow takes this into consideration but their purchase price was $104K higher than ours (they bought two and a half years after we did).

We are considering a challenging our tax assessment based on their assessment and a several others around us. But then again we hope to gone from this house before the new rate is completely phased in.