It’s not too late to join the competition to win more than $1 million from Zillow for improving the Zestimate. But it will be soon!

This week we’ve hit two exciting Zillow Prize milestones. First, we’ve had more than 2,500 teams submit a solution for the first round of Zillow Prize. The competition is heating up as more than half of these teams are working steadily on improving the submissions. More than 1,600 teams have made their latest submission within the last ten days. Second — as of Friday, we’ll be one month out from the team merger deadline, and just six weeks away from the close of round one!

If you’re worried you’d be really far behind if you started now, don’t be. Many folks have been generously sharing starter code in the form of Kaggle Kernels and daily posts on the Zprize forums from folks looking to form teams. We expect team formation to heat up here in the last few weeks before the merger deadline.

We’ve also authored an article on Kaggle’s No Free Hunch Blog about the perils of developing models like the Zestimate where we make new predictions for every home in the United States daily. There is advice in there that many data scientists should find useful, especially for folks competing in Zillow Prize.

Recommended:

• Train, Score, Repeat, Watch Out! Zillow’s Andrew Martin on modeling pitfalls in a dynamic world