Zoopla

pogofish

I'm beginning to think that Zoopla is becoming as dangerously addictive as MMPORG games.

I am constantly amazed at just how many people I know start bobbing up and down go into a - "LOOK IT UP ON ZOOPLA. ZOOPLA, LOOK IT UP NOW - IWANTTOSEEHOWMUCHITSGOINGFOR, ZOOPLA ZOOPLA ZOOPLA WILL TELL US - NOW!" frenzy as soon as any house in my area goes on the market or they find that one has been sold.

Its nothing short of spine-chilling!

mwpt

pogofish wrote: »

I'm beginning to think that Zoopla is becoming as dangerously addictive as MMPORG games.

I am constantly amazed at just how many people I know start bobbing up and down go into a - "LOOK IT UP ON ZOOPLA. ZOOPLA, LOOK IT UP NOW - IWANTTOSEEHOWMUCHITSGOINGFOR, ZOOPLA ZOOPLA ZOOPLA WILL TELL US - NOW!" frenzy as soon as any house in my area goes on the market or they find that one has been sold.

Its nothing short of spine-chilling!

There was a zoopla role playing dress up meet recently. Someone was confused and turned up as a sort of shrimp.

kbrumann

With so many people critical of Zoopla's algorithm, is there a competitor to Zoopla you would recommend?

mwpt

kbrumann wrote: »

With so many people critical of Zoopla's algorithm, is there a competitor to Zoopla you would recommend?

I can't but how would such an algorithm work to improve on zoopla? As a human, you might arrive at a price for a property by looking at recent sales on the street and comparing those houses to the house you want to price. Are they very similar, have they had work done, loft extension, rear extension, do the photos reveal that they were very shoddy inside or require no work, is there proximity to a water source that could increase insurance, did the survey reveal structural problems, and so on and so on. No current algorithm could hope to take any of that into account, so all algorithms are going to be a guess based on only the crudest criteria of "similarity" and trends.

westernpromise

Mallotum_X wrote: »

They take the last sale price apply an inflation rate and that's the price. It takes no impact on improvements or other changes.

Not quite. You can claim ownership of a house and amend the details to include things like redevelopment / refurn spend. This then flows straight into the valuation, although seems to not affect other houses.

It is I think just a fairly unsophisticated lagging indicator based on LR price trends within locales, the accuracy being limited by its inability to distinguish between very different areas with the same postcode. For example, London W2 is Notting Hill, which is nice, but it is also the Harrow Road, which most certainly isn't.

Zoopla also struggles with areas that are mainly flats. A flat at 10 Acacia Avenue can appear in Zoopla as four or five different entries (eg. as "10A Acacia Avenue"; as "Flat A, 10 Acacia Avenue"; as "10 Acacia Avenue, Garden Flat"; as "Basement Flat, 10 Acacia Avenue", or even as "10 Acacia Avenue"), depending on how it was described at each sale. Equally, different flats may be conflated into one listing for the same reason, which is what it does with mine.

It is most useful as a way of looking at whole streets at a time. It used to be the case that people moved every 7 years on average, but Zoopla makes it clear that this stopped a long while ago. If the 7 year thing still applied, then in a street where the houses are numbered from 1 to 100, you'd expect 14 sales per year. There are about 100 houses in my road but there have been only 3 sales in the last 12 months, and 16 in the last 5 years. Admittedly this is in a last-time-buyer type of road, but someone has to sell last-time-buyer-type houses so last time buyers can buy them, and it's just not happening.

Zoopla reckons the average value of houses in this road is £1.2 million. If true, this means the tax on the buy would be a savage £64,000. That buys you a lot of extension and remodelling, which is what people do now instead of selling.

018125

I bought a house a year ago which has gone up by 183k according to Zoopla.

Would anyone like to buy it?

mwpt

My house just dropped £15k in value this month in zoopladollars. Thus, I have reigned in my spending and the economy is contracting as we speak.

MABLE

I take these sites with a pinch of sea salt. Some relatives of ours were selling their property late last year. According to one valuation site it was worth £250,000 and another between £250,000 - £270,000. However they sold the property and achieved the full asking prices of £300,000.

Also according Zoopla the price of my house has gone up by £5,000 in the last month.

Also the price of our property is £11,000 lower on Mouse website.

N1AK

For all the criticism of Zoopla's valuations there's a distinct lack of evidence based critique. If Zoopla says a particular house is worth £10k less than a year ago then how exactly do you prove or disprove that without actually selling it? The best you can do is compare to other estimates, which will typically be based on roughly the same principles of applying wider market movements to the base price.

None of the above is intended to suggest I think Zoopla provides the best possible estimates, but short of putting the time or money in to getting a proper valuation or considering sales in the locale, property quality etc manually I'm not sure there's anything better.

mwpt

N1AK wrote: »

None of the above is intended to suggest I think Zoopla provides the best possible estimates, but short of putting the time or money in to getting a proper valuation or considering sales in the locale, property quality etc manually I'm not sure there's anything better.

(my bold)
Sorry, I must misunderstand you. The better alternative is to do a little bit digging into sold prices, a little bit of thinking and evaluating and arrive at a price yourself. This will almost always be better than the zoopla estimate.