Can an app tell the cost of a home?

Can an app tell the cost of a home? The answer is ‘no’ – according to Real Estate Business

The article’s author, Paul Campbell (a real estate agent), continues

“recently there has been an onslaught of property-valuing applications and reports made available, which give a rough estimation of what a home is worth.

This includes services from CoreLogic RP Data, Domain, REA Group and RealAs, which use a simple, user-friendly model. Input the address of the property you are interested in, hit send and two figures pop up: the estimated lowest sale price and the estimated highest sale price for the property. Of course, there can be a difference of $100,000 to $200,000 between these two numbers.”

Real Estate Business did not seek the comment of realAs for this article.  This is clearly so as realAs does not provide estimate ranges – realAs provides a single prediction.  Nor did they perform any quantitative comparisons between realAs and other home price predictors or agents.

So we provided our own comment at the bottom of the article:

However, the comment was deleted within minutes by Real Estate Business.

Is there a consistent theme here?

Is the real estate industry one that does not want to be held accountable?  Unwilling to consider new ways of doing things?  Unwilling to have their information tested quantitatively.

Ultimately home buyers and sellers choose who they wish to trust whether an app can tell the cost of a home.

Hey @REB_Online why did you delete the relevant @getRealAs comment on this article? https://t.co/nGshEqrNrn pic.twitter.com/DcNgWqT5cB

— Josh Rowe (@joshrowe) December 8, 2015

Perhaps you’ll have better luck getting through their moderation filter: How to outperform property-valuing websites

This is not the first time that Real Estate Business has deleted our comments.

Josh Rowe

December 8, 2015

Categories:Customer feedback

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