Zillow reviews

So what does Zillow.com really do? Of over 12 calls to leasing agents for property posted for rent in the San Antonio area, only ONE agent emailed me back. I was talking with another friend who had exactly the same experience. We had a good laugh but are extremely frustrated. Being out of town makes it VERY difficult to find something suitable to rent. I can't recommend Zillow listings.

CAVAET EMPTOR. As a consumer, I cannot recommend Zillow. I wrote a
review on their website about a real estate "professional" who I had
very negative interactions with - and zillow chose not to publish it without even telling me why. I came to the conclusion that Zillow really works for real estate pros and protects them because it is all one big real estate "brotherhood".
This "pro" has stellar reviews on Zillow (most likely written by
himself) but every other website reviews show him just the opposite.
C'mon Zillow work fairly and honestly with both sides: realtors and
consumers. It might go a long way towards cleaning up your own "C-"
rating on the BBB site.

Also be very careful submitting reviews to Zillow - the following comes from Zillows rules and policies to realtors regarding on-line reviews:

QUOTE
"Will I know who has reviewed me?
When you receive an email notifying you of a review, you can see the username and profile of the person who has reviewed you, and, if provided, the address where the service was provided and the approximate sale price, if a home was bought and sold, as well as the year the transaction took place."

I am a realtor in Kansas and I spent TOO much money on Zillow. Like many others... I got nothing but bad leads. Total waste of money! To top it all off... I sent them a cancellation notice at the end of the month before the next billing cycle started and they not only charged me a cancellation for the following months... they also charged me the full ad rate for the next month which was scheduled to start in the next couple days. These people don't operate with morals or ethics so beware. They produce fake leads in addition to bad leads. I'm sure they produce some good leads too... I just wasn't fortunate enough to receive any of them.

They just dropped our house's value again, which coincided with our property tax increase based on VALUE. The house behind me is for sale. It is a stripped down version of my house. Mine is ALL brick, this one is all hardi plank, our pool is much larger, our finishes within the house are the TOP of the line, their house is basic, and the cost put into building it is apparent. they are both 6500 square feet, and mine has an elevator, a theater room, a billiard room, a HUGE master bedroom suite, Italian marble kitchen countertops, the list goes on. Where does Zillow get their nerve, saying they use reliable sources. Come visit my hosue, zillow!

Our house was showing $230K week 1, $250K week 2, $259k week 3, $222k week 4, and the vaulation curve has also been changed. This seems a bit dramatic to me. House nearbvy all similar and their pricing is all over the place, there is no consistency.

Recent numbers are changing massively, sometimes weekly, with no basis in fact.
For example, a house across the street from me, two doors down, just dropped from $590k to $520k over the past week with the entire past history price chart revised as if the high valuation (which was consistent over many months prior) had never existed.

The strangest and most clearly defective part is that this house sold last month, just closed and the new owner moved in over the past weekend. The sale price was $588k. How could it suddenly be worth almost $70,000 less? It can't. Zillow is calculating on defective formulas, using bad data and is unreliable and dishonest in reporting past valuation and valuation trends.

If zillow is crapping on your house value, return the favor - box up and anonymously send them some dog poop. we shouldn't have to tell them everything about our homes to improve our value on their site. Instead, if they get enough dog poop from a certain area code, they'll get the picture that their is something wrong with their model there...

Agree with most of the other posts here - the price data they have on zillow is just wrong. Two roughly identical houses on my street - one valued at $1.9M, the other at $1.2M. Same bedroom, bath, sq. ft., acreage, amenities, etc. Don't bother with this site - it's useless.

They have dropped the price zestimate on my house by $100,000 in the last 7 months. So it is now only two grand over what I paid for it, 10 years ago... Even though my neighborhood has exploded the last few years, new development all around me, literally. You can't even get a "lot" in my neighborhood, for more than 60grand of their zestimate. And my next door neighbors house, who has exactly the same house, is listed as having 2 more bedrooms and 2.5 more bathrooms? I had contacted them about multiple listings of my property and to remove interior photos from 4yrs ago. They sent me some bs form letter about their algorithms. The worst!

I need to list employees houses worth.
These prices are wrong and these people should be arrested for invasion of privacy! If you are from Zillow and reading these reviews YOUR MOTHER SHOULD SUCK MY $#*!!

I looked up our home information on Zillow, and the home info is wrong, the house is undervalued by about 125k. We live in a subdivision in a rural area, so many of the homes are a little cheaper, but we built a custom home, with granite counter tops, ceilings, walk out basement, cherry cabinets, etc., and they have valued our home at 258k, The cost per scare footage to build is more than that. Whoever does these Zestimates, needs to have some common sense.

These people report inaccurate information and will do absolutely nothing to fix it.
US Government do something positive for a change start fining companies with numerous complaints against them or shut them down!

I’m working in Bogatov Realty Inc., successful company with a high indicator of sales.
We signed up for Zillow leads service in the end of 2013. The result from it is absolutely ZERO!
The company pay $2500 per month, but never get a real leads. Its leads look like a fake with wrong phone numbers and nonexistent emails.
We want to stop our contract, but cancellation fee is $6000! This is like a real trap! We are disappointed!

Zillow.com created a totally wrong event, listed our house as sold and foreclosed to lender. We contacted them, they said sorry, but they do not make any correction to remove the wrong information on our house in Zillow website foreclosure listing. It is wasting our time and energy because we contact them four times, they did not take any action to fix the issue. The website information is not reliable and inaccurate.

My home is listed as a foreclosure.... HUH??
And I must register with them to correct THEIR false information?
I think not. Bogus info, leads to nowhere, old and invalid listings. Don't waste your time.

I was a Realtor when Zillow first started and, at that time, there was not enough data to give their pricing much credibility. Today that is a different story and I rely on this site for not only pricing info but they actually have much more than even the MLS can provide. For research, invaluable.

I downloaded the app and want to save favorites but that requires registering through Facebook. I cancelled Facebook so now it appears there is no way to register which is extremely frustrating. It seems ridiculous that that you need to have Facebook to register for Zillow.

My real estate agent warned me that this site is not very accurate, so just be careful. However, it does give information about the prior sales for the home, which can be helpful!

Zillow recently changed the three schools listed for our house. I contacted Zillow to have them change back to the three assigned schools were were rated 9, 9, and 10. They make excuses and nothing happens. So, the schools listed are 9 (assigned), a NR (Christian school), and a 3 (Alternative High School). I am not sure how Zillow can consider my concerns a bother. You would think that Zillow would want to reflect the actual information, the correct information, but it does not seem to care. I guess, the Zillow CEO does not care also and this is reflective on his personnel.

My review was rejected twice. The first time I had put names of the people I dealt with, so I figured that was why (even though they allow names when it is positive). So I took them out, and it was still rejected. They only want positive reviews. Their estimated values are never very close according to my loan officer and 3 different agents I worked with in buying my current home. Below is my rejected review.

Zillow makes a serious error. I bought this condo 2 years ago in all cash $620,000. I still live here and never sold this home. The public record showing a sale on 3/7/14 for $370,00 is a different unit in the same building. It is my other all cash purchase of unit 201 in the same building 400 W Ocean blvd Unit 201, a 2 bedroom unit of 1070 Sqft, not Unit 2402, 1760 Sqft.
Caution: Do not believe Zillow's appraisal as it does not consider the location, view, elevation, improvement, etc, and it uses erroneous data.
Zillow must correct and make a public apology immediately as it is a defamation and depressing the property and it's neighborhood value.
Written and posted by owner on 4/18/14…

I have also reported to Zillow to correct the erroneous public record and it says the site will take 2 wks to make correction. Then they ask me to send evidence to prove it. Why can't they go back and check their record when the burden of proof and correction are on them.

I wonder Zillow deliberately made the mistake in order to generate traffic to the site. Now, you all will check the site more often to see if Zillow defames you and devalues yours and your community property values.

Or Zillow is really a giant real estate website that is full of trash and no one should care for it?

What more do you think I should do to Zillow?

Bogus leads, desperate agents clicking on paying realtors ads to test the site, a waste of money, $1200 later I'm out and not one sale! There is also a large number of old expired listings going back 3 years.. A total waste of my time and money, stay away!

Bogatov Realty Inc. signed up for Zillow leads service in December 2013.
We signed up for 2 zip codes- 33160 and 33154 – total cost per month $2500
The contract commitment is a minimum of one year.
That’s a total of $30,000 for the year.
Since December we did not receive one real lead.
Most of the phone numbers and emails are wrong and there is no response.
The leads who responded are out of state and are just looking around.
We asked Zillow to stop our contract. The cancelation fee is $6000.
This is a horrible service that does not provide any real leads.

Zillow.com is a joke. My wife accidentally browsed their website and found our house listed there, but the information about the house is completely wrong: nothing but the address is correct and they even got the house square footage off by 50%. I sent Zillow.com an email asking them to correct the misinformation since I could not find a contact number to call them. When I got the email reply back, I am stunned that they ask me to register on their website and correct the misinformation myself. How ridiculous is that? First of all, I have no interest to register on their website. Second, I did not create this misinformation and have no intention to make changes to something that I did not create. It makes me wonder how this company obtained, filtered, reviewed (for errors), and managed the housing data before they put it on their website. I would not trust the housing data on their website, nor do I want to do any business with them.

On a side note, it was not until I got to this website to post my review on Zillow.com did I realized that there have been so many negative reviews on them already. I would give them zero start if the web software allowed it.

My wife and I saw a home on Zillow that we absolutely loved. The Zillow "zestimate" was very close to our target purchase price. When the agent met us at the home, we realized that Zillow was not even close to the actual value of the home. Only about 500k too low!!! After further investigation, we discovered Zillow is regarded as a joke in the market. Don't waste your time with this site!!!

Zillow is hilarious! My agent told me to be careful looking at Zillow since values tend to be inflated . I watched my house here in Austin because values have been skyrocketing. Zillow increased the value of my property by thousands of dollars every month! Nice for me! Til January when I answered a survey from Zillow with a short response. I said I thought their values were slightly elevated. Little did I know that this would begin a gradual decline in my homes value! Little by little and day by day I have been downgraded in value. In the past six weeks I have lost 10% of the value of my house! No known market factor. In fact other nearby homes have continued to climb in value. I would love to have Zillow explain this to me. Is negative survey feedback cause to damage your homes marketability? I know their values are not accurate, but at what point does their estimate become a liability? Or, is this up to a jury?

NOTHING BUT LIES AND SCAMMERS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD MOSTLY PEOPLE FROM NIGERA,WEST AFRICA, AND A FEW RIGHT HERE IN THE STATES MAKE VERBAL CONTACT AND U KNOW RIGHT AWAY THAT THEY ARENT FROM THE STATES ZILLOW SHOULD BE HELD RESPONSIBLE

I am a orofessional home stager and thought it worth listing my service but my business never shows up in the PRO listings. I continually contact them but they never fix it. Don't waste your time with a free business listing.

I'm a renter trying to find a place in the Pacific Northwest and for the last month+ I've found the search results for Zillow to be infuriatingly inaccurate. Houses show up on my searches as being within my rent range (or get sent to me in daily bulletins of houses that match my search criteria) but when I click to see the detail the rent is hundreds of dollars higher. Other times both the search results and the details page match in rent for a few days, but will jump back up in price after a few days. I'm going to have to just give up on using this service to find my new place. Disappointing for sure.

I was shocked to see grossly inaccurate info on Zillow suggesting my $322K home sold two years ago for $60k ! One place on their site they say my home is worth $322K. On their little map of my neighborhood, they say it's worth $60k. This all because of refinancing info they were provided and completely botched. Now, they want me to jump through all kinds of hoops to get them to correct their mistake. Imagine the hassle if I try to sell my home and people look at the error-filled Zillow site and see their grossly inaccurate claims and actually believe them. Awful.

Value listings of properties are way off.

Went to a professional for the value of my old house, was a 3 bedroom; whole house needed rewiring, no light socket worked, bugs everywhere, nails sticking out, cabinets in kitchen falling off, etc. Professional said it was worth about 50$ a month for rent.

Zillow said 8500. This wasn't the only house where the estimate was way off. To this day, I've counted about 38.

Zillow has a shady big money making business going on. I'm a brand new agent. Licensed 1 month ago. I was given permission to post an agent's seller's listing (to be the buyer's agent) on Zillow. Well, after I posted it. I noticed 3 other agents on my post that have no association to me, the listing agent, the seller, nor my company. I was confused. I did a test contact to see if I would receive the message. I did not, but I got a reply from another agent's mortgage broker. I contacted Zillow to rectify this immediately and was very upset and they were able to bamboozle me into spending $219 a month to get a so-called wonderful service that would also eliminate the 3 agents on my posting. After a few hours of thought and research, I noticed none of the other seasoned agents at my agency have this "premier agent" service. Also their listings didn't have other agents. I called Zillow to get an explanation and she said it's because the agents listings are rentals. I corrected her telling her they are all SALES listing. After some time, and back and forth, she hung up on me because I was quite upset. She kept giving me the sales pitch. I kept telling her I'm new and have no income yet. Anyway, shame on me for letting her get away with selling me such a high priced and worthless service. I'm going through my credit card now to fix the problem. A lesson learned as a new agent :(

My husband and I are trying to sell our home and our agent said NOT to look at Zillow because of the consistent inaccuracies and now we believe her. We looked at our house which we built in 1989 and have never sold but the Zillow site reads that we have sold it for $45K and $100K. WRONG When using this site please don't believe what you read.

recently I had confirmation that Zillow uses an algorithm to estimate the value of premises based upon neighboring data, EXCEPT when they integrate feedback from local real estate agents. I wrote about this several times, however without concrete proof until I met a real estate agent that told me how I could buy a house for less by submitting his "estimate" online and then the price would be "correct".
While I wrote this to Zillow, no response nor adjustment ever came, so there is or a definitive fraudulent action going on to the advantage of a limited number of people or there is willful negligence in not correcting the issue. I am not the only one but probably thus far the only one who put this as internet fraud.

As a Realtor, I have been amazed by the arrogance of the people trying to sell you on advertising with their site. Extremely pushy and condescending. One even said if I didn't see the wisdom of signing a 12 month contract with Zillow, I must not be much of an agent. (I have closed more than $100 million).
Then when I thought I had negotiated a 6 mos contract, I discovered right at the last minute that the deal included an automatic renewal for another 6 months. Now, somebody please tell me how a 12 mos contract is different than a 6 month contract with an automatic renewal for another 6 months with the same terms? It was just their sales person doing some fast talking. Fortunately, I caught it just in time and cancelled the deal. AGENTS: Be careful with them!

It's just amazing to see amount of real estate information on that site. Recent sales, newest listings and many pictures. Very good site.

I am a Realtor. At first the site worked pretty well. However, the leads have dried up, and they go to so many agents they are worthless. Deceptive sales practices make it even worse, and good luck canceling (even if they lied about how long a commitment you were entering into).
Add in to this the fact that they take their info from our hard work (getting listings), and there is good reason to avoid this site. To add insult to injury, they shut down my email I use on my business cards and have not been able to get it back up and running.
Their reps are excellent at taking your credit card number and your money. Not much else, though.

I live in Las Vegas which was one, if not the worst place to own real estate during this recession. On one of my own properties they state it was sold in December of 2007 for $283,000. I purchased the home in 2000 for that amount but in 2007 placed it in trust and this was not a sale. The home at that time was probably worth around 750,000. I have asked them 3 times to correct the data as it does affect values. As a retired appraiser, I have also found that they are under estimating by about 20 to 30%. Unfortunately buyers do rely on this totally inaccurate site to help them make decisions when they are making offers.

When you consider that 17% of Zillows 100 million plus Zestimates are more than 25% inaccurate it is outrageous that they can peddle nonsense Zestimates the way they do. Think of the misery and potential financial damage that homeowners, suffering with an unwanted imposed erroneous Zestimate, and Zillow refuse all reasonable requests to correct or delete the nonsensical valuation that their flawed algorithm computes. When Zillow says that Zestimates are a "starting point" they are mis-leading as when Zillow refuse to correct Zestimates they become an "end point" too.

Even more interesting is that our elected representatives have failed to introduce any form of Regulation on Zillow and other AVM companies for the damage they cause to homeowners, as well as the chaos and confusion that incorrect Zestimates create in the home sales business. At the very minimum there should be a DoNotZestimate website that homeowners can opt out of Zillows nonsense in the same way as phone users can register with DoNotCall to opt out of spam phone calls.

As a listing agent, I find it downright pathetic that Zillow takes all of our hard work, photos, listings, descriptions, and measurements and then charges us agents to have our name next to it. And for everyone who says the agents never respond, let me tell you, when I get 10 emails a day for a $18,000 listing (I'm not kidding) and I reply to each of them within 10 minutes, regardless of the time of day or night and I never get a reply from my reply. after 3 months of that, and countless emails, you just don't care to take the time to look into the properties "window shoppers" any more. (Half of the stuff on Zillow is wrong anyway, If it's any kind of deal, its usually long gone by the time you see it.)

Zillow is a waste of time and of your money!!! If you are a realtor trying to get leads in this website DONT!! It give you wrong numbers and nothing but renters.. You might as well keep it old school and door knock! And for buyers it gives you listings that have been closed 2 or 4 years back false advertising all the way.. DONT WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY ON THIS WEBSITE!!

Their estimate for the property is 415k$ ans is listed for350k$ how come?
I think they push the price up artificially.
Big bull crap.

This site can be helpful, if you ignore the "Zestimates" and expect a lot of out-of-date listings. The Zestimate for my listing was about 30% high. Then it dropped suddenly by about 60%, and eventually sold for a price nowhere near ether figure. It's still listed on Zillow although it was sold almost two months ago. Instructions for removing the listing don't work. Neither do the instructions for reporting a problem. The mapped location for the address was about two miles off in the middle of a cranberry marsh.

Zillow is horrible, the status of my house is on sale, but I just bought it, how come? I really wonder it is a system error(programming mistake) or someone false post it? How we can trust Zillow because of all these constant false information. IT is really BAD!!

Love to use Zillow as it gives a lot of great information...I really like the home loan section to help me understand loan amounts.....excellent site for the none real estate person.

I was looking for buying a townhouse or small house in Ellicott City (MD). About 50% that I found on Zillow.com as "available to buy" were sold or under contract in reality. Finally I bought a townhouse in Dec 2012 for $290,000, however in Nov 2013, my townhouse was marked on the website as "Sold May 2013 for $318,000". Where does the site gain information about houses?

Zillow is completely useless, unless you are a realtor. I own a couple properties in a high rise, and listed one for rent. I am not a realtor, but I thought the site might be helpful. On the day that I listed one unit for Rent (October 1, 2013), the "zestimate" was $272,000, and the rental zestimate was at $1900. Today is November 18, 2013, and my condo "zestimate" is now 206,000 and the rental zestimate is 1671. The housing market has improved in my area over the past 2 months, and comps for the unit in question have sold for mid 260's this month (exact same floor plan, 3 floor above and 3 floors below). I did send an email complaining to zillow about why my property value has dropped significantly. I received a canned response stating that zillow evaluated based on comps. Of course, since I'm not a realtor, this site has artificially tanked my property value. Now, I disclaimed ownership of the condo, and noted that it just sold for $5,000,000. Let's see how zillow reacts to that.

Zillow has had incorrect information about my house for at least a few months now--ever since I discovered the site, at least. I have tried to contact them so they can correct the information, but they are not returning my emails and have not fixed the problem. For some reason, they put on their site that my house sold for $10,500 back in 2008. I have lived in this home since the end of 2006, and have never sold it. I only refinanced it this year (2013). I can only think that they must have my home confused with my neighbor's, since that was a foreclosed home. Either way, they are not fixing the problem. I would NOT rely on Zillow for accurate information.

Zillow is horrible, to say the least. They do not respond to emails or phone calls. There is absolutely No Customer Service, and if you happen to get any at all, they are simply terrible. They just don't care, bottom line! Their estimates for home pricing are way off!! They don't take into consideration improvements, neighborhood, etc. They go solely off of sq footage, it's a joke!