Unpopular opinion about Zillow:

Most of those who are criticizing Zillow for giving 1 million for a Kaggle competition are just jealous they did not get that cash or just angry because they did not get a job at Zillow!

likefunnysmart
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I wish Zillow overpaid for my house. And the. Offered it back to me at a discount when the experiment failed.

likefunny

.....oh.

For everyone else who missed the news. They tried to flip houses, couldn't keep up with labor demand en masse, and went under. Yet another lesson to pay careful attention to assumptions of your models and their potential for errors.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-08/zillow-z-home-flipping-experiment-doomed-by-tech-algorithms

likehelpful

From the article: The problem wasn’t with the model itself, the problem was that labor shortages caused their holding period to go up and therefore holding costs- and that caused final sales prices to drift farther from model expectations. Really unfortunate for the 2k people laid off.

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I wouldn’t do that contest and would never want to work for Zillow wtf. Ya acting like Zillow is a top tier company lol

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Good point! I would consider it a tech company as well. For myself personally I’m just saying I wouldn’t consider Zillow due to my current situation.

(I just switched jobs though. 6 months ago I would have definitely jumped at the opportunity when leaving consulting)

It’s not even clear to me if they made any glaring mistakes inside the models, but whoo boy did they make big mistakes outside of them. You don’t embark on an analytics centered business with a strategy that leaves no room to learn from experiments to steer it.

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I’m certainly not going to defend their models - I just don’t have enough info to critique them in a meaningful way, and I think most others who have written about them don’t either. Perhaps an analyst with some time on their hands could dig into Zestimate data more deeply on properties they actually bought vs the markets they were located in, and the prices they (and others) actually transacted at, to do more of a detailed post mortem. Though I’m not sure how hard they may make it for you to gather enough data - or whether this mythical beast the “analyst with time on their hands” exists.

funny

What's wrong with another Netflix prize type situation?

I wonder if everybody there is too young to remember all the tricks to con the banks into underwriting inflated housing prices. A single bad actor can wipe out a whole neighborhood

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