Is this some kind of a miracle or not?
Zillow says my house is now worth $235,000. That’s three grand more than I paid for it!
Now, o’course…it must be said that in times past we’ve been known to pontificate that Zillow is full of beans. But possibly its beaniness is in the mind of the beholder…
On the other hand, as we scribble there’s a foreclosure on the market, just around the corner. The bank seems to believe it’s worth $225,000, even though it’s a short stone’s throw away from the conduit of blight that is hideous 19th Avenue.
That house need$ work, but it has good bones: it’s SDXB’s model, hands-down the best floor plan in the tract. And the asking price is not quite as ridiculous as the three hundred grand another bank hopes to get for a decrepit house just down the street, same floor plan as mine but with a second-rate garage enclosure bloating the livable square-footage.
😀
Phoenix is a city of small enclaves. The result is a patchwork of property values. In the North Central area, some areas are rebounding in value, to the point where prices are already looking ridiculous again. Others, elbow-to-elbow with $500,000 neighborhoods, are still on the downscale side.
The increases haven’t struck M’hijito’s neighborhood, at least not exactly. Cattycorner across the street from him, a house is on the market for $350,000. But it has five bedrooms (it’s been hugely added onto) and someone went amok with the renovations in there. Zillow still values M’hijito’s house at under two hundred thou’.
On the other hand…just now almost nothing is for sale in his area. All the foreclosures are finally off the market. Prices for truly cute, centrally located mid-century houses within walking distance (for a young person) of the much-touted light rail line are very reasonable just now. I think that returns the neighborhood to the status it held at the time we bought: ripe for gentrification.
It’s perfect for young professional singles and couples.
IMHO we’ll be rightside-up by the end of this year. And if the economy holds for just a few more years, we should at least break even on the thing.
Congrats! I loooove looking at Zillow! I hope the value continues to go up for you!
Are you still planning to sell your son’s house when it is above-water?
I’ve been looking at Zillow and Trulia–sometimes they have vastly different values for the same house. Realtor.com is the place to look.
Realtor.com provides ranges of estimates from three sources, Smartzip, DataQuick, and eppraisal.com. Among the three of them, values of my son’s house range from a low of $92,248 to a high of $215,254, not very helpful. The three “estimates,” which seem to be some sort of guess at the current value, range from $108,528 (which is ridiculous) to $186,958, about what I would guess myself.
Eppraisal.com has the lowest overall estimates. When you go to its site, you find it values my house at $155,000 and the house directly across the street, which is one square foot smaller than mine, is on an identical lot, and has a nearly identical swimming pool, at $176,640. That doesn’t make any more sense than Zillow’s estimate for that house of $247,553.
DataQuick’s site doesn’t load.
SmartZip rates my son’s house investment potential as “Good,” but you have to buy a report to get the details. and mine as “Average.”
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Hm. There must be a fire around here…lots of smoke in the air. Don’t think it’s coming from my house, Sally’s, or Terry’s, so imagine it’s off in the distance somewhere. Ugh!
I use a mix of several inputs to give me an estimated home value. Zillow is one of the inputs and is always the highest. Either way, it’s certainly good to see things moving in the right direction, isn’t it? 🙂
Yes, that’s for sure.
It doesn’t much matter for my house, because I can’t afford to move and probably wouldn’t even if I could. But my son had no intention of staying put for more than about five years, and he does feel trapped. We’ll probably never make a profit on the house, but if we can just sell without a major financial disaster, that will be good.
I am looking for properties to buy that I can rent out to generate some cash flow. Anything in the lower end around here goes into multiple offers instantly. Almost all require work – far from move in condition. No more bargains to be had. So this is good for sellers and bad for buyers. Since my jobs have been so insecure, I was thinking it might be good to go into the rental business. My timing always stinks.
By golly, I have exactly the same putrescent timing! Must be great minds in the same path.
What you’re saying is exactly what my friend in the real estate biz, John Shackleford, has been reporting lately to our weekly bidness group meeting: Investors with cash money moved into the market and bought up everything under two hundred grand. In the vicinity of $200,000, there’s still a shortage of houses and a surprising amount of competition, and yes, many of them are fixer-uppers — it’s fix & flippers who are buying them.
John said last Wednesday that he’d listed a house at around 200 early that morning and by the close of business he had FIVE offers on it. This, at 7:00 p.m. when he called to say he couldn’t make it to the Thursday ayem meeting.
You know, I think it’s my innate conservatism (pace Evan) that causes the bad timing. I just can’t bring myself to jump off a cliff without climbing down to the seashore and getting a real good look at the rocks below. By the time I’ve figured things out, it’s too late.
I tend to hold my nose a little when I look at Zillow’s valuations, since I am anal retentive enough that I do all the market comps myself on our places.
“The season” just ended around here and it was a booming market for home buying while all the snowbirds were in town. Summer is always a bit slower, so I’m curious if values will taper off or if it’s just volume that we’ll see tapering. Hopefully your son can wait it out another year or two. Certain areas around here are even starting to get stupid again (though we’re waiting for that to hit the areas where we have property we want to sell!)
His new employer promised a promotion after a year, and he thinks he at least has a shot of upward mobility at this place. To get it, though, he’ll have to take a transfer to Green Bay, which will certainly reveal the upside of living on Phoenix to him. At any rate, I imagine that will happen within a year or two, so it would be good if we could sell the place without having to do a short sale or bring a pile of money to the table.
At this point, rents are now high enough that we could lease it for about what we’re paying in PITI. But really…I would rather not be in the landlady game.