Automated Home Valuations - How accurate are Zestimates anyway?

September 15, 2025

To start, here's a quick case study. We entered the address for a single family home we're familiar with into three online home valuation models. Here are the results:

Zillow - $1,853,800

Redfin - $1,570,000

Pacific Edge Home Valuation Tool - $1,688,250

Zillow went on to give a "value range" of $1,630,000 - $2,100,000. That's a pretty big swing in net worth, assuming your home is your largest asset.

Our (human) opinion of fair market value for this property is somewhere in the $2,200,000 - $2,300,000 range.

Obviously in this case, the valuation models were way off - to the tune of around 30% in some cases. That's not very useful for any kind of decision-making process about an asset this big, even if you're just in the daydreaming phase of a move.

But in other cases, we've seen the models turn up numbers that are pretty accurate. For example, we entered a fairly new one bedroom condo into the same three models - here are the numbers.

Zillow - $512,100

Redfin - $534,513

Pacific Edge Home Valuation Tool - $497,750

These are much closer to accurate, and much closer to each other. We'd peg the value of this condo at around $510k-$525k.

So how accurate is YOUR online valuation likely to be? It's more likely to be close to accurate if your property:

Is newer construction
Is a condo
Has no unpermitted space
Is surrounded by other quite similar properties
Is located on a purely residential street
Has been sold in the past 5 years
Is not tenant occupied

As you can imagine, online tools can't process information they don't have. Among other things, they can't "see" functional space that wasn't permitted, upgrades performed since the last sale, or unusual floor plans that might make square footage more or less valuable than the average dollar per sq ft in the neighborhood.

It's the same reason that price-per-square-foot can be a misleading metric when it comes to single family homes in neighborhoods with diverse architectural styles. For example, typically the fewer levels a home has, the higher the price per square foot will be. Indoor/outdoor flow is also something that buyers will pay a premium for that's not usually accounted for in an auto-eval model.

And tenant-occupied properties? Fuggetaboutit. With rent control laws so complex that even the attorneys struggle to parse them - this is *very* case by case and affects the value in ways that AI doesn't have a handle on yet. (although we do)

Now, that's not to say these online eval tools aren't useful. Heck, if we're traveling out of state and want to do a little nosing around about a neighborhood (I mean…. who doesn't?) we use them ourselves! They're a good way to get a little flavor for what prices in an area are like. You can also use them to keep an eye on general market trends if you follow your house and neighborhood year to year.

When it comes to decision-making time, however… use a human.

That reminds us: We're humans! (you knew this was coming, right?) Yes, we are humans who know what homes are worth. Don't ask us to build an app or choose a stock - we leave those things to you. But when you need to know what your property is really worth? That, we can do.

Reach out here anytime when you need an expert opinion of value. We love to do it!