Need To Sell Your House In Kendall? We Buy Houses For Cash.

The number that moved twice

He called about a rental townhouse he wanted to sell. He said $265,000 and he said he wanted it done quickly. That was a straightforward conversation and we sent him a contract the same evening.

The place was vacant and he had been struggling to get it rented. Dated, by his own description, but not in bad condition.

A few days later the number was $375,000.

No house in that community has ever sold for $375,000 — not once. We said so, plainly, because it is the sort of thing that is easy to check and worth knowing. He said he had changed his mind and would not take less than $360,000. We had still not seen the property. On rough numbers we thought we might get to $275,000, and there the conversation stopped.

This happens, and it is usually for an ordinary reason. Somebody speaks to a relative, or sees a neighbour's house listed online and takes the asking price for a sale price. The number in your head can move overnight without anything about your house changing at all.

Which is the one genuinely useful thing to take from it: an asking price is not a sale price. Anybody can ask for anything. What tells you where you stand is what has actually closed nearby, and that is public information you can look at yourself before you talk to anyone.

Very often the number comes from Zillow, and that is worth a moment, because the Zestimate is the most quoted figure in this business and the least understood. It is produced by a computer that has never been inside your house. It does not know about the roof, or the kitchen, or the permit that was never closed, or that the sale it compared you to down the road was a full renovation. It is a starting point for a search, not a valuation of your home.

Zillow demonstrated this themselves, fairly spectacularly. In 2021 they ran their own cash home-buying arm, Zillow Offers, pricing houses with their own data and their own models — the very data behind the Zestimate. It lost them hundreds of millions of dollars. They shut the business down altogether and cut around a quarter of their workforce.

That is not a reason to distrust Zillow, and we use it ourselves like everybody else. It is a reason to be clear about what the number is: an average, generated at a distance, about a house nobody has looked at. The company that produces it could not make money buying houses at it.

No hard feelings on our side. It is part of the business and you take your licks sometimes. If he changes his mind, we will still be here.