Real Estate is a Circus Right Now

[Brian Elfert]

Brian, ZEstimate is a pretty reliable thing at this point and is rarely far off from a selling price. If anything, it's been low recently on quite a few places we've looked at. And prices have gained substantially. The offer we made early in the week was for $65K over listing on a property that was clearly undervalued after a comparable sales

The reason I think Zestimates, at least for my property, are not accurate is because last February my property had a Zestimate of $325,000. The appraisal for my refinance at the end of March 2020 was $300,000. The current Zestimate for my property is $392,000 which would be over a 30% increase in less than one year from the $300,000 appraised value.

[Jim Becker]

Oh, I understand that, Brian. It can seem weird for sure and there are certainly some properties that have a slight miss on this. But "in general", they have been refining things from the massive amount of data they have available to them and seem to be confident enough that in some markets, they will buy the property for the ZEstimate outright. Our current property's ZEstimate spiked up a bit awhile ago, but settled back to within the range that our RE agent felt was valid. When we do list, it will be at the high end of the range...maybe $20-30K above the current ZEstimate and we'll adjust accordingly based on activity. But to the point of this thread...the RE market is really whacky right now. You could very well sell your place for more than the $392K ZEstimate if your local market is running hot and it has desirable features. There are a lot of folks who want to buy a first home, "move up" from their first home or like us, "downsize" but stay nice. That's three different groups vying for the same opportunity. An acquaintance of our RE agent was speaking to him the other day and she was actually getting "sight unseen" offers on some properties she has listed...no visit, no inspections, just straight offers. Crazy it is!

[Dave Seng]

Those "sight unseen" offers can get weird - one of my friends just had a home here in Montana listed in the mid $600's - first day on the market he got a full price offer from a family in Southern California. BUT...when they came up here - they backed out of the deal before even seeing the house. The reason given - "Montana is too cold for us." And that was on a weekend when the temps were only in the upper 20's!

[Curt Harms]

An acquaintance of our RE agent was speaking to him the other day and she was actually getting "sight unseen" offers on some properties she has listed...no visit, no inspections, just straight offers. Crazy it is!

The last "crazy" Real Estate market I remember is 2008. I also remember what happened after. I'm hoping for no repeat.