Zillow; when money becomes more important than people

Jeff VanNote
3 min readNov 4, 2021

REAL ESTATE WILL ALWAYS NEED EXPERTS (PEOPLE) NOT TECHNOLOGY

If you’re reading this, you may be one of the thousands of people that messaged me back in 2017 criticizing me of my “F*ck Zillow” tank tops I had made or articles I wrote alerting everyone of what was going on behind the scenes and my predictions about their ethics and business practices. Either way, thank you for reading this.

Real Estate is a game for experts, the problem is that there are very few that know the entire game which is very very vast and demographic focused. Commercial real estate people usually know nothing about residential real estate, yet they may own or rent their home. Residential real estate people shop at malls, go to strip centers and retail stores, but have no idea on valuations or cash flow analysis spreadsheets. But all people know that every market ticks to its own beat. All people also need and require human contacts to ask questions to and more importantly ask for help when it is needed. Technology can not account for everything and no algorithm can accurately tell you a value of a property without physically seeing and touching the property, inspecting the roof, inspecting the boiler, guessing the age of the windows or even making sure there are no leaks in the pipes in the bathroom or kitchen. Does that heat even work?

Zillow went out and took a shot in the dark by zero people with real estate experience, let along zero people in lending. They came into this with big bucks thinking it was easy and frankly did not care if they lost. Not only did they drive up artificially in some markets real estate prices, they prevented thousands of people from achieving the american dream of home ownership. The best part is that REALTORS and MORTGAGE people funded them to do so, as well as institutions and stock holders, but shame on the realtors and mortgage professionals that pat themselves on the back for putting the customer first and being here to serve the community.

To give zillow the benefit of the doubt, contractors are nowhere to be found and the cost to renovate a home probably almost doubled once its all said and done. I do not disagree with what zillow tried to do, I actually believe the thought was brilliant. However, thoughts need to be better flushed out, and…

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Jeff VanNote

Founder of reverifi | noteXchange Creative Financing Expert 2x Author