Among the topics covered in the
article from the print publication: Zillow use in a down market, the new alogorithms, the challenges of user provided data, going into mortgages.
A snippet:
Wired: So how does your users' data fit into the formula?
Barton: The Zestimate is only going to be as good as the information we have going in, and there are lots of holes and inaccuracies. We opened up Zillow so owners could correct facts about their homes, publish their own estimate of their house's value, and upload pictures. We can feed some of that information back into the algorithm. If you say, "No, there are four bathrooms, not three," we take that as reality. It makes the Zestimate significantly better.
