With a “Zestimate” of $8.1 million, the “rare and extraordinary…Telegraph Terrace Penthouse” unit #20 at 175 Francisco Street hit the market priced at $7.5 million in June of last year.
Reduced to $6.5 million in September and then to $6.0 million the following month, the Telegraph Hill condo was delisted and re-listed for $4.995 million at the beginning of this year, at which point the Zestimate was dropped to $6.4 million.
And with a Zestimate of $5.3 million as of this morning, the sale of 175 Francisco Street #20 has now closed escrow with a contract price of $4.55 million or roughly $856 per square foot.
While that’s 39 percent below its list price of last year, the sale is officially within 9 percent of asking according to all industry stats thanks to its relisting this year. And of course, the Zestimates for the market in general, and your home in specific, are surely more accurate.
Z is a joke
So the story is the house is listed at $7.5m last year. In a span of nine months, the list price slid down to $5.3m and finally sold for $4.55m. Assuming Zestimate and the agent come up with their respective number independently, Zestimate is doing an amazing job. I don’t know what caused the market volatility. But nevertheless, Zestimate is tracking the market value pretty well, moving right along with the market signal .
View is fantastic. Everything else is not.
Zillow, Redfin and other automated valuation metrics have issues, but do have the advantage of being able to have regular reality checks by comparing model estimates to actual sales prices when sales occur.
Zillow and redfin both report their error stats.
Redfin looked at the model errors before and after agents update a listing for sale and claim that a good chunk of the error is due to inaccurate input data (sqft, rooms, home features,…)
It seems a good conjecture that the more unique a home or location is, the more inaccurate the estimate.
I recently came across a new listing in a Southern California city on Redfin. The listing agent had inadvertently added an extra zero in error so a 237,500 house was listed as 2,375,000 but that didn’t stop Redfin from giving it an estimate of 2,380,000. You have to laugh at something like that.
Easy for a computer to be confused here. It’s basically just 2 normal sized units connected, not a proper 5,600 sqft place. Consequently, it’s spread across 4 floors (tons of wasted space going up and down) and lacking in the large and rare formal entertaining spaces.
Clearly, zillow, et al, are only accurate when they reveal price increases.
/s