is zestimate merely a tax value on a home?

Question

I just wanted to know if zestimates and other online estimates are just really tax value on homes.

Answer 1

NO. they are not the tax values on the homes.
if you look at the 2nd page you will see the actual tax values of the homes....sometimes they take it out.
you can go to your county website to see the tax value.

the info on the zestimate site is outdated and can actually lower the value of most homes.

Answer 2

Zestimate is a trademark of Zillow.com for their proprietary method of estimating property values. Zillow attempts to estimate the value of property based upon a number of factors but do not reveal their entire methodology. I doubt that they use tax assessment values as those often bear no relationship to the true market value of a property.

From personal experience Zillow's numbers are NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate, almost to the point of absurdity. I've sold of some real estate holdings over the past couple of years and the numbers at their site bore no semblance to the reality of the transactions. They didn't even get the numbers right AFTER the properties were sold!

Zillow do point out that their system is BETA, meaning that it is still in its testing phase.