The thing about the Zestimate™? It was always a hype tool. It was always a "look how rich you'd get if you sold your house." It was always a "hey look what a great investor you are by beating this price." It was an armchair piker's metric, a bullshit statistic for the window shoppers that allowed random fuckheads to walk around thinking they knew real estate.

One of my wife's college friends came down to LA for my wife's baby shower. We couldn't walk around anywhere without her checking to see what Zillow thought the neighborhood was worth. I could say things like "that price is utterly disconnected from reality and based on nothing, that house over there sold for $100k less than Zillow thinks it's worth" and my on-the-ground observations counted for nothing because an algorithm gave her Truth.

Whaddayathink - did Zillow come up with a separate Zestimate™ in order to assess the revenue extraction from their predatory flipping practice? Or did they just get high on their own supply?

During the third quarter, Zillow said it bought 9,680 homes and sold 3,032 of them, with the sales producing an average loss in gross terms of more than $80,000 per house. The purchase of nearly 10,000 houses marked a significant jump from the 3,805 homes Zillow purchased in the second quarter, which itself was a record amount by more than 1,500 houses.

That's Zillow, drinking their own kool-aid and then puking it back up. Because their model didn't say "uhhh you can't predict what the fuck's going to happen in the time it'll take you to buy and sell a house" their model said "two points determine a line" and they doubled fucking down.