Zillow Responds To ShandyKing’s Post of Purposely Misleading Consumers

This morning I reported that complaints were filed to the FTC by the NCRC against Zillow for “misleading consumers” with their home estimates.

David G from Zillow responded to my blog post to clear things up! I felt David’s response deserved a post of its own. (To make sure it was a real Zillow employee I double checked the IP address and his comment did come from a Zillow network)

David G from Zillow.com

http://www.zillowblog.com

Hi ShandyKing, it’s David G from Zillow.com

I hope I can shed some light on these claims.

Zillow is a research tool.

The claim that consumers have “borrowed against these numbers” is not only false, it’s theoretically impossible. Don Kelly of the Appraisal Institute was quoted today as saying; no banks use Zillow’s Zestimates when writing mortgages. Regardless of what a homeowner might believe their home is worth, it’s the lender that decides whether to grant the loan.

Zillow educates the websites users about what a Zestimate is (and is not).

We measure and report on our accuracy for each county in the US. That data is available to all users of Zillow.com - prominantly - we link to it in the search box on our home page. Next, our help content explains Zestimates and their accuracy in detail. The text in our explanatory popups and help pages repeatedly says “A Zestimate is not an appraisal …” etc.

These claims are unfounded and unmotivated. It is disapointing that the NCRC did not approach Zillow with its concerns. We’ve contacted the NCRC and have requested to meet with the to understand their concerns.

Thanks for writing.

I give David G and Zillow a lot of respect for personally responding to my blog post. This shows me that Zillow is highly concerned about their brand and what their users write about them on the Internet.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.