davis_square | Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

I just saw in the Somerville News an estimate saying that property values in Somerville declined 2% this year:
http://www.thesomervillenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=218. Somebody mentioned that Zillow actually reports a loss of about 8%. This is confusing. The Editor of the Somerville News pointed out that Zillow does not have accurate estimates. In my experience, Zillow is pretty on the mark when it comes to sale prices, they seem to be doing lots of good stats on their datasets. Any idea on how to gather additional information on this? I doubt one can trust the Somerville News, given that it was created by the owners of ERA, one of the Somerville Real Estate agencies (clearly, they would not want to advertise that property values are going down around here).

One funny tidbit. Have you received a pack of coupon last week? I received one, and one of the coupons was an ad for ERA, the Norton Group. It says: "Voted #1 Real Estate Company 2000 to 2007 By the readers of the Somerville News"! Now, when many of the readers are ERA employees or relatives of ERA employees, that is a bit of a conflict of interest, isn't it? :)

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When you say that number is a 6% decline on all sales, do you mean that the average price is down 6% or that 6% fewer units were sold (compared to 1 YR ago). Regarding Zillow, I have a few friends on the West Coast who sold their places a few months ago, and they got almost exactly what Zillow had predicted. I don't know if there are any objective numbers on how well it does, though...

"few friends on the West Coast who sold their places a few months ago, and they got almost exactly what Zillow had predicted."

Um. Is that because the buyers checked Zillow and adjusted their offer accordingly?

I meant the median sale price is 6% down compared to a year ago. Number of sales throuch October is down about 11%.

Zillow says it has something like a +/- 7% accuracy, which is a $56,000 spread on the median Somerville home value of $400,000. The Wall Street Journal did a quick test last year using 1,000 recent sales and found that roughly to the be case, 7.8% median difference (absolute value), even split high and low. 11% of the sales were more than 25% off. The net-net is that Zillow data is overly reliant on public data (number of bed/bath, size of plot, comp sales) and can't accommodate for things like recent renovations -- other than relying on public assessments to reflect the renovations.

Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

Not sure I understand.

Re: Not sure I understand.

Re: Not sure I understand.