Zillow Tried To Screw Homebuyers...Got Screwed Themselves
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- čas přidán 7. 06. 2024
- I think we’re all too familiar with just how expensive housing has gotten over the past few years. A lot of the price increases can be explained by low-interest rates and inflation, but a good amount of it also has to do with corporate meddling with the real estate market. At this point, it’s no secret that private equity firms and large investment funds have been buying up single-family homes to flip them or rent them out. This has made it extremely difficult for the average person to keep up with the spending power and purchasing power of these massive corporations. One corporation that also entered this game was Zillow. After seeing private equity firms pull it off and entire startups being built around the concept, Zillow decided to enter the house-flipping business. The stock market was initially skeptical if Zillow could pull it off, but they gave Zillow the benefit of the doubt. In the end, it turned out that Zillow could not pull it off. They would end up burning nearly a billion dollars and shutting down the business altogether. This video explains the story of how Zillow tried to enter the single-family flipping business only to get burned and never return.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - The State Of Zillow
2:12 - Immediate Red Flags
5:34 - A Small Loss
8:42 - Getting Annihilated
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Disclaimer:
This video is not a solicitation or personal financial advice. All investing involves risk. Please do your own research.
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There is increasing talk in Congress of banning corporations from buying single family homes. This market is primed for regulation.
Which should have been done after 2008
I'll be over here just holding my breath.
Yeah.... I don't see this happening anytime with our current Congress.
I would legitimately support a law that makes it illegal to own more than 2 real estate properties (ideally one for you one for your buisness) and importantly it would be impossible for a corporation to own a property. Best case scenario nothing changes except the flood inventory makes housing affordable. Worst case scenario nothing changes but now single family homes are unprofitable to build so only apartment buildings get built(which still drives down costs) and a whole lot of jobs are created for no reason but to be the legal property owner for the landlord company
@@brendanwiley253that idea is painfully bad
Zillow tried to scam me. I asked for an offer from them to buy my house and they gave me a lowball offer (60% less than it was worth). I obviously said no, but after I rejected their offer, their "Zestimate" of my house, you know, the public estimated value of my house that prospective homebuyers see when they research the property, dropped from $720,000 to $220,000 (they offered me $250,000). If I had actually been trying to sell my house, this could have made me unable to do so because Zillow LIED and said my house was worth so little. I know the Zestimate is BS but that's what your average home buyer has to go by. Zillow was basically trying to make it so I HAD to accept their scam of an offer because their artificially low Zestimate value would have scared legitimate buyers away. This company should be completely dissolved and the owners put in prison.
I go by property tax history, since those are the guys who are going to end up screwing me
@@cpK054L Me too. I go by the property tax records to see how much I should pay for a home.
So do you pay lower taxes since it’s worth less on there?
@@willpagan1316 the tax people calculate their own value, they are not using a random "zillow" value.
bro how much are you paying in prop tax? damn
F Zillow, they're "Zestimate" is part of the reason why Housing is still way too overpriced
In areas where Zillow owns a lot of homes. We now know why. I areas where they don't own homes the opposite maybe the normal, under priced homes.
Really? Do you have proof of that?
Idk about that. Their algorithm isn't all that dissimilar to what agents have done for decades. Compare the square footage to "comps" and go from there
So they set the standard for looking up average pricing in neighborhoods to help buyers, then they bought a bunch of real estate, inflated the value of property in the area and tried to cash in on an overinflated value set by themselves....did I get that right? That sounds like a case of very obvious market manipulation, shouldn't they be defending themselves in court at this point? I feel no sorrow for Zillow, the top end should be fighting not to go to jail and should be fined into the dirt.
Pretty much hahaha
There's should be a laws against manipulation of the basic of basic needs like food, water, shelter and hopefully internet.
That's why there's more suic1de rates than ever and lowest birth rate in history, no one wants to live in this economy and no one wants to bring anyone into this economy.
I do not feel sorry for Zillow.
Hahaha savage
@@LogicallyAnsweredas a kid going into the engineering field for their future, what do you recommend for me to do with these goddamn house prices?
@@ragibmahfuz5241 live below your means and invest as much as possible into indexes like QQQ. If interest rates ever go to 0% buy asap
@@ragibmahfuz5241move to europ
Like you know Zillow personally
Zillow let their competition takeover. Their site used to be good until they let people delete the sales history of properties and relist properties over and over without showing they had already been listed.
Thanks for sharing this, idk 😮
why they do that?
@@MangaGamifyI’d imagine people would be more apprehensive about buying a house on Zillow if each property had a history tab showing previous price listings that were possibly lower. People wouldn’t want to purchase a house that the sellers clearly previously thought was worth less then the price being asked now.
Wow, didn’t know they allowed such craziness
Sounds exactly what I'd look at Zillow for. They folded to the sellers@@MangaGamify
There was about 18 months there where Zillow was buying everything that hit their math targets per square foot, without regard for very localized external traits. These houses were "unsellable" because of things like: trashy neighbors, on a busy street, next to commercial/industrial lots, criminal activity, etc. We sold one of our rentals to Zillow in early 2019. This house couldn't attract quality renters due to a persistent drug house next door. Zillow offered us about 1% under the median square foot price, and we jumped at it.
At least someone benefits from corporate greed. Haha they thought they were screwing you but you had that uno reverse card up your sleeve 😂😂.
The part that Zillow agreed to offload their homes but to INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS is pure evil 100%. These homes should never be owned or even temporarily held by investing firms.
True, but they did, "Blanche". We'll soon see those firms selling as they have raised rental prices way beyond market bearing. The houses are sitting empty. Empty houses aren't money makers (cash cows). Thus, money losers or not good investments.
Evil cause you're not getting any
@@Mahlak_Mriuani_Anatman What does me possessing or not have to do with their evil and social inequality？ People could be billionaire like Warren Buffet and still feel sympathy （and still buy up things） all at the same time. Grow up.
You're a fool. Wall Street owns less than 1% of the single family homes. The overwhelming majority of non owner occupied homes are owned by landlords that have 1 to 5 properties.
So if you and a few friends gather up some money and buy a bunch of houses, that's supposedly wrong.
Zillow learned the hard way what the rest of us already knew, which is that the Zestimate was a really flawed estimate with little relation to reality. By simplifying the selling process down so much, most of the sanity checks went out the window.
Exactly
Zillow is fairly accurate where I live
I'm happy for me, but feel bad for the people we bought from. Our house was undervalued by about 15-20k because they used the zestimate. Yay for me though
@@dismurrart6648 well that’s just bad due diligence on the sellers part not Zillow.
@@JDmix123 oh I'll absolutely take anything that benefits me, but it does hurt others.
Zillow sounds like it should be the name of a pillow company
Hahaha, cause they rhyme?
MyZillow
Zzzillow 😴
My Zillow by Mike zindell
So the name Zillow is supposed to give off a homey feel. So I see what they were going for.
As a Realtor in the Houston Area, if your agent is using Zillow, other than for marketing-you need a new agent.
Since the pandemic house prices went up largely in part to “algorithms” like mentioned. Once a property is sold at “higher market value” it’s hard to tell your seller to sell it for less even if the reason: disruption the housing market can trickle down negatively. Conversely, agents did have incentives to get homes sold for higher. But here we are. I understand we needed to bounce back from the stagnant COVID market (some not others) but, driving prices up for houses/apartments (places we need for survival) is/was devastating for everyone. I think using algorithms for things like: housing food vehicles- is evil.
Oh no I feel so bad for the billionaires who were trying to pray on average people 😢
*prey
And because Zillow artificially inflated home values in my state...that is the number that the county assessors used when levying our property taxes. So now we're getting scr...ed by the state when we didn't even sell!
Gen Z has almost no chance in buying a home anytime soon. Rent of shoebox rooms cost more than mortgages of a decent house just a few years ago. Inflation and interest rates are skyrocketing. Wages are simultaneously shrinking in proportion. College degrees are the least valuable they ever have while costs are at an all time high. We're fucked.
No kidding, and let's also not forget how automation and ai is taking over the skilled labor jobs, and places that are hiring only hire you part time to skimp you on benefits.
Aye let's look to the future
Everything will be OK
Okay bud
Its actually so insane. I thought I had no chance as a late millennial and even I was depressed about the fact, thinking I wouldn't be able to buy a house... but I got lucky by buying in a cheap area with parents help during covid. Now I literally just sold that same house for 58% (!!!!!) more just 3 years later. Like Gen Z is actually fucked without real law changes. I cannot believe that I just managed to slip in before things got crazy...
You can be happy and own nothing
buying a house isnt even a good thing though, its cheaper to rent a 2 bedroom or smaller then buy. Also how do you think new york city goes, they have no houses and seem to be doing quite well
Zillow bought 2 homes in my neighborhood 4 year's ago. One for 566K they resold 11 months later for 528K plus paid for minimal fix-up ( paint, fixtures ) and lawn care. The other one they paid 440K and probably paid 150K in renovation costs and sold it 18 months later for 542K. Today those houses would sell for 610K with Zillow value 630-640K. You gotta get damn lucky to make a profit when you start the transaction 50-60K in the hole.
I live in most competitive housing market, Realestate agents use same approach as Zillow to make offer, they look at SqFt, no of bed/bath, lost size of recently sold homes and come up with a number, and most of the time they don’t even negotiate with sellers, they even push buyers to pay more than market value.
As someone who worked at one of those 4 companies and was let go when the market was correcting. It was a wild ride… that’s for sure.
The fundamental thing that makes massive corporations less successful than local experts is fungibility. The concept that you can freely substitute between different examples of the same kind of thing is crucial to money, the norm for stocks and bonds and the ideal for commodities. On the flip side, segments like used cars and houses all have their own stories that affect the value of specific examples, so the coarse data-driven operations of companies that can't grasp the fine example-specific details are unable to adjust to the realities a local expert can see, resulting in self-inflicted information asymmetry.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics
This is a business that should not be legal.
Housing is one of the necessities of life. One has the god given right to own a house if one worked hard enough to buy. For corporations to come in and flip them for profit is morally reprehensible. It's like a corporation buying up all the food in a grocery store and selling them to people at a markup. It's just a disgusting thing to do and the government should stop it.
I'm sorry to report, that is exactly what happened with grocery stores too. Look at the price of food the past 3 years.
Algorithms.
Nothing ever went wrong putting all eggs in that basket. 🤦♂️
That's cause Al Gore invented them
Real estate agents CONSTANTLY battle clients telling us their homes are worth X because of a Zestimate they saw. If Zillow couldn't make them work for their business, why do you think they would work for the average consumer? The only reasons we haven't been replaced by tech are twofold: 1) Most people want to interact with another person for such a big, personal purchase and; 2) There's a LOT of undocumented or poorly documented local knowledge about neighborhoods and home buying.
What they could have done is use the data to build the homes single families want in the place they want it and then sell it to them beforehand with profit building it after the sale
No tech company would want to get involved in that mess. There are small homebuilders to provide this service. At one point during the previous housing boom there was a startup that used this model to provide a one stop shop service for customer home building....bad business model and they went out of business.
Anyone who watched Zillow and used it on a regular basis, knew Zillow estimates suck ass pretty regularly. Every realtor I’d had, explained its limitations and how inaccurate it regularly was. They also don’t remove listing the way Redfin does so houses stick out there forever when Redfin gets rid of them.
So Zillow purchased houses and sold them with a huge discount to private corporations, guess who owns those corporations? The same people who owns Zillow, and who pays for the loss? The retail investors! No wonder the stock went from $200 to $46😂
You have to jail executives that engage in duplicitous or outright illegal behaviors. Fines just become another “cost of doing business.” They aren’t actually a deterrent.
Just love it when greedy bean counters mess themselves up!!
Zero creativity rightly deserves zero reward or even penalties.
The funny thing is the executives ignored everything. They claimed listing their properties was "Free", ignoring that the loss of profit from listing paying customers in key ad spaces would hurt their profits. House flipping is also a low margin game unless your rather unethical about it. Normal house flippers get away with it because they change their company name or move states constantly to avoid bad reputations. Zillow however would be raked across the coals in the news if they sold your average flop house infested with rats with a new coat of paint like the successful house flippers do.
It’s not karma. Like open-door, they heavily relied on their dumb incompetent agents to flip. Most of them do not know what they are doing.
Good video man keep it up
Thank you Radestein!
our county used zillow data to estimate property tax valuations that were sky high so they could raise taxes without sales first ... colorado and likely nationwide
People stop buying land and started buying perception. Silly
selling my townhome and buying my new home in 2020 was the best decision i ever made. paid 254,000 for my house. worth 400,000 today only owe $195,000 left.
High prices are not a blessing for home owners, its a blessing for home makers. Home owners only benefit if they plan to die soon. Or, you know, move out, sell the house, buy nothing at all, live in a cardboard box or on a hospital bed. Best case - when home owners want to downgrade. But their old, used house without fancy modern repairs may cost them less than they expect and smaller dwelling in a worse area may cost quite a bit more than they think, so downgrade may end up costing more than doing cosmetic repairs instead of bringing in a fortune, like many expect.
Deflation on real estate is not necessary bad, it's like any other asset. It would like complaining about a stock that dropped in price. Cheap money/currency promotes increasing leverage and pushes prices up. This hurts labor in the long run.
Deflation isn't bad, the problem is that currency is inflating. So the later you are, the worse your chances are and the more difficult it is to obtain assets in the first place because your purchasing power is shrinking.
It would be like complaining that cars or food or something like that had dropped in price.
One of the few good things from Wallstreet bets is their outlook on stocks going down.
"Look at this sale!"
I find it helpful because everything ebbs and flows and it's easier to weather scary times
@@ponraul1221honestly, this mindset is fomo and causes you to make bad fiscal decisions. "Buy now or you won't be able to ever" is the call of sales guys trying to make their numbers.
If you can't invest in your property, you can invest in your retirement or a stock portfolio.
That's what my partner and I did until we had enough to get a house. Then all the targeted fear mongering switches from "no one is able to buy anything right now" to "all those years you had with your cushy house are behind you and you are 2 weeks away from losing it."
It's all engagement bait.
Best channel on YT. Good job, my dude!
Thank you Chief!
This is such an awesome channel!
Thank you so much William!
Also when you try to scale house-flipping at desired Silicon Valley scaling pace you'll eventually be left flipping houses to yourself.
$881 mil is a sh!t ton of money
Indeed
True, but also not enough at the same time.
Indeed you do
Great video as always
Thank you as always Balpreet!
How do home owners benefit from their house price going up if the price of the house they would buy with it has gone up as well?
Sticky situation but they are ways to take advantage of equity in your house (other than selling)
Nothing. They will have higher property taxes and insurance 😅
They don't. All they get is higher property taxes and insurance. They also don't benefit if they're not planning to move.
The biggest problem with Zillow's home flipping business is no one can be held accountable. An individual usually flips one property at a time and stops when they start to lose money. In Zillow's case, apart from losing their job, Zillow employees have no responsibilities whatsoever. Hedge funds can do this because they're using someone else's money, Zillow has to borrow money and that means they're on the hook for all the financial risks.
My general opinion is that real estate isn't an investment because nobody treat it as such. I just love that only a tech company can shrew up a golden oppertunity
Awesome video, this shows that data don't tell the full story and purely relying on data is a bad move..same theory applies to the stock market!
Good video. Thanks.
People don't realize Realtors are worse than Used Car salesmen.
Where are all the idiots who said we will all be renting our homes from corporations from now on? This was the hottest youtube topic for like 2 years straight.
Blackstone
It’s still en route.
The idea of bots trading houses won't die with Zillow.
If Zillow is going to be an estimator of housing values, then they should not be buying real estate. Conflict of interest.
Great example of disastrous AI that blow up on Zillow.
It wasn't AI. It was greedy and dumb decision making
My parents rent out homes in a small town and they furnish clean and maintain those bad boys… I can’t tell you how many air conditioners we’ve bought and placed… my parents have a flat rent rate and keep it as low as feasibly possible because people who rent the homes are usually struggling. However the only rules we ask is don’t break anything if you can help it try not to party to much and be respectful of the neighbors. We’ve yet to have a bad tenet but my parents bend over backwards to try and handle situations and home problems the day of a problem.
You're parents sound like good people in general and great business-owners
@@HermannTheGreat they are great people and great business people.
Everyone buys houses to flip now.
Homeowners don’t benefit unless they sell. And even though, they would be without a house adults in a rising home market. And everyone has to pay rising property taxes when they are reappraised at the higher values.
so how would I check housing prices?
The bigger they are, the harder they fall!
I am a seasoned real estate investor and Zillow is only one of many data bases that I look at. Trust me, you need to work with an established private broker to get the maximum on sales and best fair market value at buying. As in any deal, INTEL and not data readily available makes for the better deal.
I don't feel sorry for corporations going bust when they planed to price gouge people on homes. The more interest rates go up the more owning multiple homes hurts. And if a corporation has tens of thousands of homes? Well, they bought it. They get to pay for it.
Make a video about IAC. Would be interesting
Thanks for the suggestion Hurshneet!
honestly i dont even remember what zillow was is it a place that lists houses or buys and resells them
i really like your content and especially your data resources, that's why i would love to know what site you're using to get company's info like revenue and profits please? anyone in the comments knows either?
All my resources are always in the description:)
now that the housing market is cooling off, im seeing many investor bought homes from late 2021 - mid 2022, are now in the red. Some are on the market below purchase price.
Can you do a video on this for other institutional investors?
It’s a good thing there are now multiple pre fab options being rolled out. Are they ideal, eh. But it’s an answer to the current market overall.
I hate them. Lifeless properties.
Whats the name of the song that starts at 2:14?
They started deleting older listings too! To make the market seem less saturated. Please look in to this. I noticed it about 3-4 months ago.
Honestly what Zillow was trying to do wasn't so bad, they was buying but selling them later. The giant Investment Funds like Black Rock and Vanguard has been buying but not selling as their intention is to rent them out or lease out the land for Commercial.
BlackRock and Vanguard don't buy up homes. You're thinking of Blackstone, and they're not even a major player. The largest buyers are Progress Homes, Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent; the latter two are publicly traded companies, so ordinary people can make money from what they are doing.
I worked for them in 2019 in the DFW market. Quit after three months.
they're algo was so bad, even 3rd graders know it's a bad deal. I think they were trying to do the "amazon" business way of doing things.
And now that the sellers are not allowed to cover the Buyers agent fee, Buyers wil be raw dogging it with these Real Estate platform. I remember when Zillow was selling houses $100k over market value in the neighborhood of houses that are just $400-600k. And there houses sat for 2 years.
your videos are interesting.
We bought a house from Open Door. It was a great experience, although we might have overpaid a little. 3 years later, we sold it for about $100k profit, although we also checked our offer from Open Door and it was ~$10k less than what we ended up selling it for (to a human couple). Because of course, that's the whole business model. If they bought at the market price and sold at the market price, they might need to hold it for, I don't know, 3 years to make $100k? I'm in love with the feeling that _we_ in a way actually screwed _Open Door_ over
You overpaid and you think you screwed them? Girl Math...
Local investors will always have an advantage over national companies since the know the market.
Good!
how do you mess that bad
Zillow then only sells back the houses to other companies as final jab to home buyers.
so yeah just like I thought no average Americans homes were causing the market to go up it was companies over inflating home prices and pricing out first time buyers. Maybe zero percent interest rates was the worst thing the Fed did sure it kept the economy they shut down afloat but yeah look at where we are now.
what happened to Zillow's senior management, who was responsible for this disaster?
The first real estate agent i went with worked for a company owned by zillow.
They introduced an ai tool that was so aggressive and creepy i terminated our business relationship.
I think the dramatic housing price is also bad for general home owners who used their houses as residence because the property tax and insurance may come in to bite those house owners. This dramatic housing price is Only beneficial to those "real estate investors" who makes money directly on selling houses.
Housing is a human right, it shouldn't be a corporate commodity to profit off.
Nothing that requires the labor of another person is a human right.
Right? Where do you live.
Nope. If I am 25 years old and refuse to work society owes me NOTHING!
They are a bunch of greedy lawyers.
this makes me feel better about my horrible trades 😂 we buying at the top 😂
6:45 Americans have to pay for instant bank transfers?
Oftentimes yes
They should have just invested in development of neighborhoods not flipping houses. Way better margins and you can literally build a neighborhood with all the amenities needed to sell well in that area.
This is the danger of using a one size fit all algorithm. The answer to all complicated question is: it depends.
Maybe they should pour income into DJT. Probably similar probability of success.
Wow did you think of that all by yourself. I’ll make sure you get a gold star today
Got a good deal with them and got a check so I’m happy lol.
It’s all cause the rich people! Government fucking up hardcore has nothing to do with it!
then what is Blackrock doing correct?
Black rock owns real estate trusts, meaning just about everyone's 401k owns blackrock. Black rock then builds more cracker box apartments and pushes DEI to companies it owns like Disney. It is all evil.
Zillow is nothing short of evil and greedy. I paid them over $300k for leads…initially it was wonderful, then the greed…oh, lord. Just awful. F Zillow.
can you explain in more detail? what leads did you pay $300k for? what does that mean?
In the real estate market manipulation will be even harder.
Before you'll push anything, people will just take other homes around. The market isn't even close to being fungible, but you can't just push up prices to infinity. After all, you're not really competing against other institutions, unlike in the stock market.
Additionally the high transaction costs, even if you buy at fair prices, make the business model in and of itself harder. I mean you need to pay the taxes etc. So it doesn't function from the ground up.
interesting!
Zillow has been the obvious phony real estate site since the beginning. The valuations are always off.
So with all the knowledge and insight they had. They failed, hard.
Sounds like how it goes in Silicon Valley!
Hahaha
Seems like the fox wanting to live in the hen house. Because if everybody depends on Zestimate for their valuations, and Zillow wants to buy your house, then they are motivated to lower that number. It seems to work in the car industry. Carmax and Carvana offer you money for your car, but there already was an outside appraiser, "blue book value", and tons of competing offers you can quickly go get. Thanks.
The endless greed is sicking.
It’s the home sellers fault for trying to sell their houses for a huge profit. That’s what causing inflation. This was happening even before the companies starting buying up houses.
The government printed 30% more money. Might have something to do with the inflation, eh?
How can you have a bankrupt probability of over 100%??
3:24 Yo I know that guy, whats he doing in random B footage lmao
I would love to know how low sellers sold to zillow 😅
Good karma.
Failed to be the Mammom from Cassette Beasts and Lenna's Inception.