Pasadenan's Q&A

Of course, I know lots and lots of ways.  So do most people.

Have you overlaid the z-estimate trends?  If not, you should, as they both have been fluctuating, and they really are not that different.  Don't just look at the 1 year trend.  Look at the 5 and 10 year trends as well.

Oh, and the other thing that signals a "buy", is 20 to 25% annual mortgage interest rates, to discourage the other buyers.  That is the best way to get rid of competition.

Well one thing we know for sure, a "buy signal" does not occur while the federal government is still propping up prices...As they say, buy when everyone else is not, and don't buy while prices are still inflated.So, when Linda decides it is more profitable to dance than to sell Real Estate, then it might be the time.But as I said before, I'll buy as soon as any agent can show me they found what I've been looking for.  And since I've already posted what I'm looking for multiple times, I'm not going to bother posting it again.  The agents can look it up, assuming that they actually learned to look things up at some point.

The feature was changed; it is now only click-hold and drag...

I can see only one possible way that this would be a "legal" issue, and that is if it was blatant racial discrimination and you had substantial evidence to prove it.  Other than that, it is not just about the money... there are many other factors sellers consider when accepting an offer, such as "contingencies", and "closing date", and "credit history", or even promise to maintain a tree of sentimental significance to a family...

By the way, Aaron, I'm tempted to send you 35,000 for you to do CMA's on since you are so sure you can do what Zillow does for "FREE".

Forget the CMA; it serves an entirely different purpose than an estimate based on every ownership unit sold in the area, and neither would hold up in court nor an IRS audit.  If you need something to hold up in court or for the IRS, pay an appraiser for an appraisal.  Realtors are not licensed to provide appraisals, and they don't even provide a tolerance for their estimate.If you are in an area where sales data is not made public, you can't get a Z-estimate.  I'm not remembering about your area, so you just need to go to the property pages for your area to see if it is given.Zillow also allows for "user estimates".  There is a button near the top of each home page that states "my estimate", with a "create" button next to it.  Press "create", and follow the instructions.  But that is not a "Z-estimate".A Z-estimate is a "least squares curve fit", also known as "linear regression".To understand it better, look up the LINEST function in your Excel program, and especially look at example #3, "multiple linear regression".They don't tell you all the terms used, nor whether they are only first order, or perhaps 2nd and 3rd order as well.  But they use all the recently sold, do the linear regression with the public records info (Size, lot size, #beds, #baths, #stories, year built, tax assessed value, year last sold/date sold...);  with this info, they create the equation for the area and check each price with the price calculated.  If the price is way off, they throw that price out and calculate new coefficients.This is modified some for certain areas based on various idiosyncrasies.  For example, in California, using the tax assessed value directly would cause major discrepancies due to proposition 13.  Therefore, proposition 13 rules are applied backward to the tax assessed value first, before plugging in the numbers.Once they have the set of coefficients, they then plug the county data for each of the properties into the resulting equations to calculate the estimate.  The tolerance of the estimate given is based on the R^2 value for the original curve fit.Even this is modified slightly due to owner given data.  Though they don't just replace county data with owner supplied data, they do factor it in.  They don't want to let people know how it is weighted nor what ranges are thrown out, as they want to discourage people from trying to manipulate the estimates.The machine does this automatically 3 times a week for all properties with public records, assuming sales data for the area is public.  They don't tell you how far away is considered "in the vicinity", but you already know that the denser the area, the less distance they use, and the more rural the area, the more distance they use.The estimates are then used to calculate an "index" for neighborhood, zip code, city, county and state.  The "index" is just the "median", meaning half are higher, and half are lower.  It is just a matter of knowing the total number of units, and counting to half of them when sorted by lowest to highest.  If an odd number, it is just the value of the middle.  If and even number, the two closest to the middle are averaged.  They do exclude some under certain conditions.  Using the historic information, they can give trends.  The one year, 5 year, and 10 year index trends are much more useful than the estimates by themselves as fluctuations due to small sampling size tend to cancel out.

No.  The resolution is what it is, Assuming you opened the page that states "birds eye view and map"....HOWEVER, you can "zoom in" (to some extent), and if using FireFox..., you can use the ctrl-+ keys to expand to make the page larger..., which then could make the whole screen just the map...To make the page smaller, it is ctrl--, and to go back to normal size, it is ctrl-0.  (that is a zero, not an oh).And of course, if you are very creative, you could copy the images out of your cache, and then just paste them together.  If you scrolled a lot when zoomed in, you could get a fairly large detailed image.  Personally, I don't think it is worth the extra work, but perhaps it depends on what it is used for, and if you can avoid violating copyright law.

Besides, if you think it is a "violation", WHY are you posting your address in a public place?????  You are violating your own privacy!No one looks at your home, as you would have noticed it you looked at the page view count at the bottom of that page..., but now you are trying to get others to look at it by giving the address???It looks like you should sue yourself for violating your privacy.