When is a Zestimate not a Zestimate?

Previously we discussed how the Value
Range seems to be missed by many of our users. Today I’d like to spotlight something which is lost on very few
Zillow users but stirs up the fiercest emotions when it is. I’m talking about houses without a Zestimate — more specifically, this post explains the data that we display instead of the Zestimate when we don’t calculate one. At last
count, the gap between the 48 Million houses with Zestimates and those without one was around 18
Million. 

Now and again, we receive feedback that kicks off with something like "What gives you the right to decide that my home’s only worth X?". The cause of that frustration is often a misunderstanding of this issue.

The primary reason we don’t calculate a Zestimate for these houses is
that they’re often located in Non-disclosure
States — and a few other areas where we have access to the tax assessment roll but not to sales records (like upstate NY). Another reason for this is that in some rural areas, there hasn’t been sufficient sales activity
in the neighborhood in question to infer current market values — "Real Estate is local" — our algorithm understands that and it knows better than to take wild guesses based on incomplete sales data.

So, how do know when you are looking at a property without a Zestimate? Once you’ve searched for a house and you can see it on the maps page, take a look at the top of its data-bubble. If you are looking at a house without a Zestimate, you will see "Zestimate: None
Available". That’s not what gets some homeowners steamed, rather it’s the next information we display that is often misunderstood.

In the place of the Zestimate, we publish one of two other values, both of which are collated from the county’s assessment rolls. In the first example above, we show the property’s Tax assessed value. That’s simple enough to understand; it’s the value your county uses to calculate your annual property taxes.

In the second example, we display the Market assessed value. In States where the rate of increase of property taxes is limited by law, this value is closer to the fair market value of the house than the Tax assessed value is — so we use it instead.

It’s that simple — these values are not Zillow’s estimate of your house’s market value (that would be the Zestimate) and we understand that they are likely to differ (often substantially) from the price your house could fetch when it is sold. They are however often a useful indication of the relative value of properties in a neighborhood.