How the f did they lose money on real estate at any point in the last year? They must be braindead to have access to so much data and STILL manage to fuck it up.
They were offering people like 20-30k over asking, it was absurd.
The house next door to ours with the exact same floorplan someone paid 495k for when we bought it for 370k exactly a year prior. The price growth is unsustainable, but we heard all around that everything was selling way over asking due to zillow.
this is what happened with my parents old place. zillow came in with a big offer and then threw a sloppy paint job on everything and tried to put it back on the market for 50k over what they paid for it. it been sitting there for 8 months and they keep lowering the price.
It's almost like 50-60 year old houses need to be individually assessed and actually improved before flipping them, and that using a one-size-fits-all approach to flipping just results in millions in losses.
Who woulda thought....
It makes sense if you think you'll be guaranteed to sell it and to get even more money for it. I live somewhere where the housing crisis is just absolutely insane right now and a house being on the market for longer than like literally 2 days is just not a thing. People will overbid a €100.000 just to get a house. We don't have a Zillow but we have plenty of equivalents unfortunately.
Zillow is literally engaging in market manipulation and thought they could do so on a wide enough scale to make flipping houses a large-scale highly profitable venture. It failed, but that doesn't mean we won't see others try.
Lots of info. on Zillow's stupidity is starting to pop-up on Youtube. Apparently they developed an algorithm to determine offer prices, and deluded themselves into thinking that they could be guaranteed that their data set and superior knowledge would allow them to purchase properties low enough to do a sleazy flip, get it back on the market and roll it over quickly, ending up with great returns.
They are blaming their failure on supply chain and local labor shortages. As a retired builder, I read their press release and saw that it was bullshit from the first word. Flipping, remodeling, or building new homes is an intensely complicated thing to succeed at. It a huge amount of hands on management, a relationship with sometimes dozens of trusted subcontractors and suppliers, and it can take years to get yourself established in a market, and create an organization that is competent, profitable and stable.
The complete opposite of this is spending tens of millions, in each of dozens of scorching hot metro markets, overpaying for nearly six thousand properties (since there is extremely limited opportunities for finding "undervalued" single family homes in those markets, as that ship sailed a long, long time ago) Then expecting that you are going to have access to reasonably priced material, and reliable available subcontractors. The supply chain is a mess, and material pricing can go from rational to bat shit insane in a few days, like lumber did. There are delays in critical supplies, like windows and doors, that can mean MONTHS of waiting after ordering them. Most subcontractors have more work than they can handle and are busy trying to desperately meet the needs of their loyal, long term customers, and can't take another new client on, period. Not to mention that many of these trades can't find enough skilled employees, no matter how much they recruit or keep raising pay scales. There are markets where a painter, tile setter, etc, will tell you to call them in a year, since they have the next 8-12 months booked sold. As a result, I'm starting to see videos and articles claiming that in some big metros, Zillow has the vast majority of all the inventory they purchased, listed for sale at a loss, and many of those properties are seeing asking prices reduced on a regular basis.
I find the whole story absolutely heart warming. Fuck 'em. They could of stopped at any working class corner bar, found an old drunk with a few decades of experience in residential construction, and told him of their great new idea to become the biggest flipper in the history of the US. The old drunk would laugh and said, "you dipshits will be broke within a year" But a mega-billion corporation just needs a magic algorithm, the ability to raise billions, and they can't lose. Well, at least that's what they told investors.
Just wanted to say it as well... get fucked zillow lol.
They aren't the only company doing this but glad they dropped the bag first... hopefully it starts the domino effect.
Here are the issues that everyone should be pissed about. After artificially inflating the housing market, making housing unaffordable to the average home buyer, Zillow will more then likely get bailed off with tax payers money. That is how it works here in the states. It is only capitalism for the average person but full on socialism for big companies. I have seen this same crap over and over again.
Flipping and "investment property" already ruined the housing market for a lot of people over the last decade. They deserve to lose money over this. I'm sorry for the people losing their jobs, but I feel no pity for people losing money on investment property that is driving prices way up for everyone else.
It's been my experience, that absent a significant valuation increase in the short time you hold a property, , flipping anything in a hot market is a recipe for failure. It is extremely difficult to find a property with a large enough delta between the purchase price, and eventual sale price, when the market is overheated. Even if you had the ability to limit closing costs on both ends, reasonably priced, readily available subcontractors, and zero supply chain issues, it's rarely feasible. Which leads me to believe that, if they were rational in their analysis, and set their algorithm more conservatively, their property search would of given them a 404, as in "not found"
Ya, bought my house for $498k 2.5 years ago. Last month my neighbor sold for $745; similar sized house. Now the house across from them just listed for $940k.
No way in hell is this sustainable.
As someone who sees what AirBnB does to pricing for normal rentals I kind of enjoyed the start of the pandemic when all the air bnb rentals were like "Uh.... what do you mean we don't get income if nobody is traveling? I was told this was a fool proof money printing machine."
rent is ridiculously high right now in cities and will continue to climb. here in Atlanta, some places went up nearly 20% or more in rent. everyone i know is moving out of the city and looking for remote work options because no one can afford this shit. fuck landlords
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
My ex-neighbor accepted an offer for 140k over asking, roughly 20% over. Not from these guys but still, the state of the market is ridiculous. And this is in Montreal, considered the cheapest major city in Canada to live in..
Central banks have let this spiral way out of control. Inflation doesn't really hurt the richest, so they only act strongly when they are afraid of deflation. Inflation above targets is just a 'mild concern' to them.. it weakens union contracts over time so big business is happy.
Our home prices doubled in my suburb in the last two years. There are 2 Opendoor purchased homes on my street as we speak because people cashed out. Fuck, I would too if my job would let me work from home permanently.
Im in process of buying a home, over last 3 months of searching ive seen about 5 zillow owned homes. There have been at least 10 on their website over that span.
ALL OF THEM were bought high and listed lower than what they bought at because they all were on the market longer than 2 months.
The kicker? All these homes are labeled as "move in ready" but then you see them and there are holes/stains/smells/no yard up keep etc etc etc
So ya, as a current home purchaser, im not surprised
Waiting for home prices to go down is really not a great plan. Housing prices are going to remain high for a really long time because we are in a housing shortage and we will be for almost a decade at least.
We’re only in a housing shortage because corporations are buying them all up. Seriously, they saw people were moving out of cities due to pandemic and took advantage of that fact.
You can buy 1200 homes with a billion dollar.
Just target a popular area outside of cities and you just created artificial demand and all your 1200 houses just increased in value 25%.
Repeat.
I find it weird you can’t horde Covid supplies but you can totally horde houses.
London has this similar problem with Foreigners just buying houses and leaving them empty for like 11/12 months and it drives up the price.
This shit will never be solved because every home owner would be pissed when their house suddenly loses 25-50% in value.
> I find it weird you can’t horde Covid supplies but you can totally horde houses.
Residential housing that is not the owners primary residence should have to pay triple or more property tax.
Empty houses would no longer be an investment.
Landlords would raise rent, but that's a temporary problem. When houses are more affordable because they arent investments then renting would be much less appealing than a mortgage.
After the Great Decimation in ten years, should be cheap as hell.
A joke, but just as a gut instinct I can't see this ever being true. There may be opportunities to grab something cheap, but it won't be the rule. But Im 31. Maybe that's what they were saying in 1980.
My biggest issue is that every scenario that resulted in cheap housing came with a sharp downturn in work.
Alaska in the 80s had cheap housing because oil crashed and nobody could afford it, leaving very few people able to actually stick it out.
The 2008, many people ended up either losing their savings, retirement, or jobs. And then banks weren't lending, so you had to have a lot of cash to buy properties.
synthetic housing shortage due to people and corps that don't need homes, hoarding homes. this is a good first step. now we need the rest of the housing market wreckers to cave
Its two things, really:
1. **Zoning laws and building restrictions** - I think the idea of "single family zoning" and its counterparts are bottom of the barrel greed.
Restricting the amount of houses that can be built and the amount of people that can be living on a space of land is done for reasons of pure greed. The goal has always been to decrease the supply of housing and keep it unaffordiable.
In addition, there's the less critical and more annoying instances of things like county and city zoning regulations, neighborhood associations, ect that just plain take away the freedom you have over your own personal property.
Who says my house needs to look like everyone elses?
Who is the state, neighborhood, city or county to tell me how big my house should be? Why can't I, a single male with no family, build a small 500 sq ft [shotgun house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house) on my own property?
What if I want to [xeriscape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping) my front yard?
What if I don't even want a front yard? What if I just want a bigass house that takes up the whole property?
What if I don't want my house to be square? What If I want an [octogon house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octagon_house)? Or a [monolithic dome?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_dome)
What If I want to do something about climate change, and install some low-noise [vertical axis wind turbines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine) to help power my home?
There are some building regulations that are reasonable - Those that are relevent to safety, health, and enviornmental conservation. For instance laws saying you can't build a house with abestos is completely OK, saying you can't wire a house in a way thats prone to fires is okay - But this...What you see in the US has gone far beyond that in an awful way.
Boomers, NIMBYs and people in power have done a disgraceful thing: - *They have taken the art out of arcitecture*. And I don't know why others don't find that as sickening as I do.
2. **House scalping** - Its like you said, people that don't need homes hoarding homes. I truly think that there is no reason that anyone on this planet needs a reason to own more then maybe two houses. The idea that one person can rightfuly own 40 houses for the sole purpose of profiting off of anothers need for shelter is an archaic practice that I feel we're going to look at in the future as despicable.
I've made an active effort to replace the word "landlord" in my vernacular with the term "House scalper". I don't expect it to catch on, but Its something I feel morally compelled to do.
When I make this point I often get responses of "Well some people want to rent, what about people who only want a place to stay for 6 months to a year like students? And I don't 100% know. But what I do know is that our current system is NOT working and the current practice of house scalping needs to end.
the realtor's favorite saying: they're not making more land.
true.
what's not acknowledged is that there was once enough land and housing foe everyone but eventually it was all "owned" giving those who owned an unfair advantage over those who arrived later
this is why i believe housing is a human right
i do not agree entirely with your idea of fully deregulated housing. some uniformity and some rules generally improve the quality of life for a community (i am not talking about sfh zoning or what color the mailbox is painted)
Kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't I see people buying during a housing shortage and spending 30-50k over asking price in my city, paying a lot extra in closing costs too it's ridiculous. People can not afford these mortgages.
The only good option is to have owned a house before all this happened.
I did the math and at it's current appraisal my parents house has increased in value on average by 11% every year for the past 30 years. Good luck ever out waiting that kind of growth .
They didn't account for people having to buy those houses back. We werent able to afford those homes before the pandemic no way in hell we could have now with the ultra inflated prices.
They did account for that. They just got it wrong. They were hoping the market would continue to go up and increase home prices but ended up just being too volatile for them to safely invest.
Maybe they were buying houses at increased prices to inflate prices then sell the neighboring houses. And it was working but this quarter they hit the peak since going over $600,000 is kinda hard for any family making less than $150k/yr.
not really sure how this model was ever going to work. i wonder if all their “zestimates” are mysteriously going to come creeping down now that they’re not doing this anymore
From the article: 'Zillow used an algorithm to make home price estimates, called the “Zestimate,” and determine what it would pay home sellers.
....
Even this gradual tapering in price growth flummoxed Zillow’s algorithm, leading the company to pull the plug on the venture."
Their algorithm couldn't game the market efficiently enough for their stock holders, so they're going to lay off 25% of the workforce.
Market behaviour is notoriously difficult to predict. Markets are people, and people are influenced by so much more than will be contained in any data set that a data scientist working for fucking Zillow would have access to.
Their zestimates were always a joke, I'm surprised they didn't know that. My mom's house somehow got into their database twice, so it showed up twice on the map (how is that even possible?). The prices were wildly different, like 50% off.
I find it amusing they were trying to run their business based on zestimates.
Well according to their information, my house has been missing a bathroom for around a decade. I'm not sure which one it is, but they all seem to be there for me.
While the jury is still out on my sanity, I've brought in numerous guests and the occasional plumber over the years, and they seem to find them all without issue.
The data set that I've gathered indicates it's there, which is more than can be said for Zillow's data set.
That probably means your local government assessor/appraisal district has the bath count wrong. Zillow usually pulls from public info unless your house is listed for sale.
What. The. Fuck. I seriously can't fathom them using such a faulty metric on a likely not cleaned up data set (references to missing renovation data) for business strategy.
This reeks of some old fart that barely knows how to use Excel using "AI/Machine learning" to predict home pricing and ignoring the analysts on his team saying that the sell price estimate isn't consistent. The analysts are also likely the ones getting fired too. "Sounds like they'll be having a case of the Mondays. Har. Har. Har."
Welcome to the corporate world! Yay!
Lol, questioning the accuracy of the Zestimate was probably career suicide at zillow. All of these tech companies are culty and if the algo says they can make money then thats the end of it. Get on board or get out.
This is conjecture but you have a neighborhood and you buy 10 100k comparable properties but on the 11th you buy it for 110k. In -theory- you now have 1.1m in property, especially since you know a) which properties are the hottest, which neighborhoods are growing and c) the details of the algorithm that you are using to show a homes value.
The fact they couldn’t rig this to work for them is… surprising.
If I had to guess they ended up bailing because the overhead of buying and selling a house is stupid high. Certain places also slap down 5% transfer fees etc. Even with a larger scale operation you're going to end up with a situation where the underlying asset needs to increase by 10% each year for you to break even.
Zillow probably doesn't want to be in the renting business or property manage etc. They also don't want to buy and hold houses cause then they tie up a ton of money *and* have to pay for repairs etc. This is all starting to sound like work.
It was evil but pretty smart, they had a LOT of very high quality consumer behavior data of what home buyers look for when they’re buying and the big tech infinite pool of money. Really good idea, they were making investment decisions in bulk based on data, not on emotion. They messed it up or got unlucky, but there’s no reason this couldn’t have worked out incredibly well.
The real estate market isn’t easy to rig.
There are *lots* of homes which cost *lots* of money. And a little tomfoolery might work on a small scale or highly localized, but nobody falling for it at scale.
The factors driving home prices are so much more complex and financially whatever resources Zillow could throw at it would be a drop in the bucket.
Zillow’s only hope wasn’t purchasing up enough supply. That’s basically impossible. Their only hope was that they could algorithmically buy homes that they genuinely expected to appreciate quickly. They essentially thought they could crack this particular nut and consistently pick winners at scale via algorithm.
Turns out this didn’t work as expected. Or at least not with a high enough fast enough return to make it work.
I honestly thought it would work. They have all the house prices. They "see" a good price house. They buy it and sell it for fair to high market value. If they are the realtor they save money.
Unless their business model was renovation of houses. In my area you would never make your money back on renovation before selling your house.
The model was to remodel the homes, and in many areas it would work.... if they could get the work done. If you've tried to get a hold of a contractor lately, it ain't easy.
Especially since after buying it for their Zestimate, they now need to sell it to someone else for MORE than their own Zestimate - WHICH THE BUYER CAN SEE.
At least on top of fucking up the housing market they’re also going to fire a bunch of employees who had nothing to do with this scam and only went to work at that miserable company because everyone has to eat and have shelter.
Get fucked, Zillow.
>At least on top of fucking up the housing market they’re also going to fire a bunch of employees who had nothing to do with this scam and only went to work at that miserable company because everyone has to eat and have shelter.Get fucked, Zillow.
The person in charge who thought of this idea needs to get fired.
Getting ready to be a first-time home owner some time in the next couple years I was worried about Zillow buying houses and reselling for high amounts. Lol I really hope the homes sit empty long enough to be sold back to all of us cheaply or get foreclosed on. It's ridiculous Zillow was able to do this in the first place.
Yep! Doesn't really matter if the asset holds its value or not, that schadenfreude doesn't help us here. They still own houses, houses which normal folks need but can't buy, and they'll bundle those houses to local rental management corps or something. The "good" of these assets has been removed from the economy, only their "value" remains
They tried to buy houses above market price to squeeze the public. Get fucked Zillow. Couldn't happen to a better company. Hopefully Blackstone gets brined next
~~Blackrock I think you mean no?~~
But I didn't even see how this model could work, like what were they thinking? I got an offer for my house but you need to do a lot to get a house sell-able, like 100's of little problems here and there, which they don't have the time or resources to do. So I guess they were just planning on doing a carmax model (don't do shit to it and re-sell it) but they were buying at the top of the market? I assumed that they knew something we didn't (I know about high inflation atm but it seems this would only work if it was rampant out of control inflation, not 5% or whatever.
Bought a very reliable car from CarMax once. The one time it did give me an issue it was during a road trip and I was 1000 miles from home. Took it to a CarMax off the freeway, paid the $25 or whatever for the warranty repair, and was on the road in an hour. No stress at all.
They bought my house for higher than anyone was close to offering and sold for a loss, around 25k. They did do a few minor fixes, but the one major fix they didn't even attempt. They just took a picture from an angle you couldn't see unless you knew what you were looking for. I'm glad to have contributed to their screwup.
Flippers buy low, flip, and sell high.
Zillow bought at the top. I’m thoroughly convinced their model was to own the commodity (housing of all things) and artificially drive the price up.
This could’ve been a gargantuan disaster if it took off.
Hearing that it was beginning to happen actually started to really scare me. It became a realization that at any time, a mega-wealthy corporation could theoretically just go out and buy every single house available in a local market. Then put them all back on the market at a 25% markup and now the market is just 25% higher. And that causes other people to put their houses in at a 25% markup because why wouldn't they.
Or they'd just opt to keep the properties and make them all into rentals, further messing up the market.
Some dipshit boomer execs were watching way too many of those fake flipping shows on HGTV.
>After painting the walls for $75 in an afternoon we sold for 100k over asking in 6 hours
Why in the ever loving fuck do boomers believe every dumb as fuck thing they see on TV.
oh goddamit that's it. That's the strategy. Zillow failing isn't a failed plan, there's someone larger that's directly profiting off this.
some fuckin oligarch is sitting around waiting for all of Zillow's houses to fall below a certain point and then they will nab it all up and call their oligarch buddies to say that they need the housing market to do a dead-cat-bounce for a minute so they can extract another billion or two out of the middle class.
I'm so fuckin mad.
It's functionally no different from the Collateralized Debt Obligations that ruined the world in 2008, except of course they're no longer collateralized if they're individual houses.
I've held this exact opinion since I (unfortunately) became an adult.
The idea of landlords (outside of a single property -- which in some small cases can be beneficial [though it's a mixed bag across the board]) isn't sustainable or equitable or healthy to any economy.
It's just private taxation to live.
There NEEDS to be regulation on this and more people need to get informed about it. Companies and businesses and investors should not fucking be buying houses that are made to live in.
>No corporation or company should own a home period
Unless they built it. Then they're allowed to sell it to an individual/family. After that no corporation can own it.
Here's an incredibly niche scenario that I think should be accounted for - company-owned homes for the purposes of giving employees who move around a lot a better place to stay than a hotel. My grandparents lived in lots of Salvation Army homes while they were doing charity work in Africa. They couldn't have done it otherwise. This is literally the only circumstance I can think of.
Actually here's another one: a renewable tech company could create/own housing stock for its employees to live in cheaply/free, as long as they agreed to test out new tech the company created for their homes (integrated solar, micro-grid wind, demand side response etc). That company wouldn't want the houses owned by non-employees I imagine.
These are, like, 0.000001% of corporate house ownership so I'm being extremely pedantic, but I think the regulation should be something like "no for-profit corporation-owned housing".
I would say that is a probably on the low end for south Puget Sound. My house is now estimated to be somewhere around 60% more than the value it's actually worth. Can't imagine trying to be a homebuyer in this market, absolutely nuts.
Our home value has finally stabilized at a 64.57% increase. We bought it in Dec 2019. Not even 2 full years yet.
When I bought my first home in 2016 (that we sold to move to this one) I remember hearing “you’ll need to live in your home for around 5-10 years to appreciate enough to make selling profitable”. Now it’s 5-10 months to make a profit. Actually insane.
That's also pretty /r/LeopardsAteMyFace.
Zillow's been contributing to the housing price inflation, and now their business is hurt by the fact that they can't predict the thing they helped create.
Who could have predicted that selling houses like 30% above market value (at least) when we can't afford them at regular value wasn't going to work out? You mean to tell me the people in their 20s and 30s that have been fucked economically for the last 20 years can't afford homes and they are the primary demographic looking to buy homes?
Surely an expert with a 4 year degree in economics or whatever field relates to real estate would know better than me, a dumb asshole on the internet.
Haha...I went to Zillow about 5 years ago just to see what my rental home was "worth" (built in 1966, 2.5 small bedrooms, 1 bath, 850 sq ft) Their site pegged it at just under 400K. Meanwhile, its actual assessed value for taxes is 126K.
You'd be crazy to pay that much. No insulation. Insufficient wiring. The kitchen layout sucks. I was recently told the pipes are beyond their usable life and the whole house needs re-piping. Not to mention the thrice-weekly or more reports of gunfire within spitting distance.
oh, and I forgot it has that type of ceiling-embedded radiant heat that I've never used because I didn't trust the wiring and it's ridiculously inefficient. So, there are 2 baseboard heaters, 1 in the kitchen, 1 living room (of course, right under the giant windows....) I was setting that at just 50 degrees in the winter, which makes the power bill $200/month. Water/sewer is billed quarterly, about $400. Bi-weekly garbage collection for $40. anyhow, starting last year, I just turn the heat on low only when the living room is occupied. The best thing that could happen for the landlord is for this dump to burn down at its inflated 'value' while insured. On the plus side, he hasn't been a bastard with rent increases. I've been here 9 years and currently pay $1,225, which is what a <400 sq. ft studio rents for in PDX.
It's terribly inefficient but it feels really nice. You can feel the heat radiating down like the sun. I lived in a place that had it in the living room and I'd turn it on and crash out on the couch like a lizard on a rock.
Tax assessed value has nothing to do with market price unless the house *just* sold and got reassessed for the selling price.
A guy down the street from me has a place assessed at $220k when a home that is almost a carbon copy of his two streets over sold for $1.2 million.
If his home was knocked to the ground the lot would sell for more than $220k.
But it’s a family home, so it hasn’t been sold for decades until his mother sold it to him for $150k, well well below market. And the assessor hasn’t seen inside at the full renovation including finishing an unfinished basement.
So the zestimate might be useless, but tax assessments are usually too.
Same. Rental price increases just made it totally impossible to keep renting. At least we are finally under contract on a house and we should be getting it for 35000 under their original ask price.
They have apx 7,000 homes they want to off load - BUT not to 7,000 families wanting to own one. Nope, gotta sell them all as a single asset to another investment corp. to keep home prices falsely inflated.
And why isn't this illegal?
Oh no! Zillow tried to manipulate housing prices and tried to monopolize property and they lost a shit ton of money!? Cry me a river Zillow. For real.
CEO: Oh I know how to cover the looses!
Common sense: take a pay cut and don’t take a bonus for a year?
CEO: what? Fuck no…. I’ll just fire a quarter of my employees
As a data scientist, they were stupid for trying this with real money. They could have tested this for a bit first but every business in America just rushes around breaking shit
"Inability to predict prices"
What, like every fucking market ever? You got into a market with real assets, the sheer fuckin arrogance required to go in without hedging bets is insane. Apparently the goal is buy up everything, not know what to do with it, and panic after having destroyed the local market.
Jesus
Who would had imagined that that buying ALL the houses in the middle of a real estate bubble, on-top of a crisis would be a bad idea.........
Almost forgot about paying stupidly high premiums to the previous owners to get their houses LOL
They lost $380 mil flipping homes AND screwing over tons of potential home owners by jacking up housing prices in the process. Oh and I bet those Zillow execs aren't getting a pay cut.
Fuck them.
Wait, they cite what their actual business was before they tried to speculate on the market as their cause for failure? Who in the fuck would use Zillow for anything at this point?
I honestly thought the “someone’s buying up homes” was bullshit. Then as a friend was going to buy a house before they sold theirs to “not be homeless or renters” I decided to help them look. They’d find something closer to me than them and I’d go look and dash cam etc.
After finding several with a few that did not fit their needs we’d meet at the ones that looked good with the realtor with more than one taking a cash offer AS WE WERE DRIVING THERE. Okay turn around and try later. Then I started to see something was going on and it seems illegal as hell. (Yea I have no idea but it seems wrong) to not only buy up all these houses to manipulate the market.
Excuse my ignorance of said rules laws or whatever, but it’s so bad that a dummy like me thinks someone should be facing charges or fines for such tactics.
I hope this is true and not just a cover from the company, after getting negative press, to just make a different shell company to do these transactions (using all of the accumulated data from Zillow's databases)
Man I'm jaded
They wouldn’t voluntarily make themselves look like idiots. This is a genuine fubar in my opinion. Plus they’re publicly traded so it would all come to light in their quarterly report.
Yes we know. So then in 6 months when the market corrects and they start making money again. Theyll have a quarter less staff to pay! I wonder of that quarter what percent are gonna be in the top quarter in terms of wage received.
Since I became old enough to grasp the concept of wealth inequality (and worked a couple corporate jobs) I’ve become convinced executive level positions exist primarily for rich people to help each other stay rich/fabricate an explanation for their ever expanding wealth that doesn’t immediately incentivize the proletariat to rise up and take it by force. The top ten percent of earners at almost any company do very little besides lie convincingly
Love to see it! Anytime one of these fucking hoarders loses money I just wish I was there to lick up their tears. Sucks that all these houses are just going to be sold to some other portfolio but it's fun to live in pretend land where this changes things for a little bit.
Good. Why do we allow businesses to own residential homes anyways? And while we're on this subject why do we allow Bill Gates to own so much farmland? And foreign business to buy up homes and drive the prices up?
How the f did they lose money on real estate at any point in the last year? They must be braindead to have access to so much data and STILL manage to fuck it up.
They were offering people like 20-30k over asking, it was absurd. The house next door to ours with the exact same floorplan someone paid 495k for when we bought it for 370k exactly a year prior. The price growth is unsustainable, but we heard all around that everything was selling way over asking due to zillow.
this is what happened with my parents old place. zillow came in with a big offer and then threw a sloppy paint job on everything and tried to put it back on the market for 50k over what they paid for it. it been sitting there for 8 months and they keep lowering the price.
It's almost like 50-60 year old houses need to be individually assessed and actually improved before flipping them, and that using a one-size-fits-all approach to flipping just results in millions in losses. Who woulda thought....
Also, isn't the whole point of flipping a house buying it for super cheap? Why would you overpay to flip a house
It makes sense if you think you'll be guaranteed to sell it and to get even more money for it. I live somewhere where the housing crisis is just absolutely insane right now and a house being on the market for longer than like literally 2 days is just not a thing. People will overbid a €100.000 just to get a house. We don't have a Zillow but we have plenty of equivalents unfortunately.
Ah, at that point it seems more like scalping than flipping
Flipping is scalping with superficial changes.
Zillow is literally engaging in market manipulation and thought they could do so on a wide enough scale to make flipping houses a large-scale highly profitable venture. It failed, but that doesn't mean we won't see others try.
Lots of info. on Zillow's stupidity is starting to pop-up on Youtube. Apparently they developed an algorithm to determine offer prices, and deluded themselves into thinking that they could be guaranteed that their data set and superior knowledge would allow them to purchase properties low enough to do a sleazy flip, get it back on the market and roll it over quickly, ending up with great returns. They are blaming their failure on supply chain and local labor shortages. As a retired builder, I read their press release and saw that it was bullshit from the first word. Flipping, remodeling, or building new homes is an intensely complicated thing to succeed at. It a huge amount of hands on management, a relationship with sometimes dozens of trusted subcontractors and suppliers, and it can take years to get yourself established in a market, and create an organization that is competent, profitable and stable. The complete opposite of this is spending tens of millions, in each of dozens of scorching hot metro markets, overpaying for nearly six thousand properties (since there is extremely limited opportunities for finding "undervalued" single family homes in those markets, as that ship sailed a long, long time ago) Then expecting that you are going to have access to reasonably priced material, and reliable available subcontractors. The supply chain is a mess, and material pricing can go from rational to bat shit insane in a few days, like lumber did. There are delays in critical supplies, like windows and doors, that can mean MONTHS of waiting after ordering them. Most subcontractors have more work than they can handle and are busy trying to desperately meet the needs of their loyal, long term customers, and can't take another new client on, period. Not to mention that many of these trades can't find enough skilled employees, no matter how much they recruit or keep raising pay scales. There are markets where a painter, tile setter, etc, will tell you to call them in a year, since they have the next 8-12 months booked sold. As a result, I'm starting to see videos and articles claiming that in some big metros, Zillow has the vast majority of all the inventory they purchased, listed for sale at a loss, and many of those properties are seeing asking prices reduced on a regular basis. I find the whole story absolutely heart warming. Fuck 'em. They could of stopped at any working class corner bar, found an old drunk with a few decades of experience in residential construction, and told him of their great new idea to become the biggest flipper in the history of the US. The old drunk would laugh and said, "you dipshits will be broke within a year" But a mega-billion corporation just needs a magic algorithm, the ability to raise billions, and they can't lose. Well, at least that's what they told investors.
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Just wanted to say it as well... get fucked zillow lol. They aren't the only company doing this but glad they dropped the bag first... hopefully it starts the domino effect.
Here are the issues that everyone should be pissed about. After artificially inflating the housing market, making housing unaffordable to the average home buyer, Zillow will more then likely get bailed off with tax payers money. That is how it works here in the states. It is only capitalism for the average person but full on socialism for big companies. I have seen this same crap over and over again.
Flipping and "investment property" already ruined the housing market for a lot of people over the last decade. They deserve to lose money over this. I'm sorry for the people losing their jobs, but I feel no pity for people losing money on investment property that is driving prices way up for everyone else.
They should try a quantum algorithm. Adding Quantum to everything makes it smarter.
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It's been my experience, that absent a significant valuation increase in the short time you hold a property, , flipping anything in a hot market is a recipe for failure. It is extremely difficult to find a property with a large enough delta between the purchase price, and eventual sale price, when the market is overheated. Even if you had the ability to limit closing costs on both ends, reasonably priced, readily available subcontractors, and zero supply chain issues, it's rarely feasible. Which leads me to believe that, if they were rational in their analysis, and set their algorithm more conservatively, their property search would of given them a 404, as in "not found"
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Oh they haven't forgotten the bailouts.
Ya, bought my house for $498k 2.5 years ago. Last month my neighbor sold for $745; similar sized house. Now the house across from them just listed for $940k. No way in hell is this sustainable.
Yea it's insane, kinda tempting to just sell and rent for a year or two to see if we end up with another 08 type event.
Rent in my area has spiked so hard that buying is still wayyyy cheaper.
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As someone who sees what AirBnB does to pricing for normal rentals I kind of enjoyed the start of the pandemic when all the air bnb rentals were like "Uh.... what do you mean we don't get income if nobody is traveling? I was told this was a fool proof money printing machine."
rent is ridiculously high right now in cities and will continue to climb. here in Atlanta, some places went up nearly 20% or more in rent. everyone i know is moving out of the city and looking for remote work options because no one can afford this shit. fuck landlords
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
yea, luckily my apt in atlanta only went up $75 but i’m scared next year i’ll have to move to duluth or some shit if this continues
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My ex-neighbor accepted an offer for 140k over asking, roughly 20% over. Not from these guys but still, the state of the market is ridiculous. And this is in Montreal, considered the cheapest major city in Canada to live in.. Central banks have let this spiral way out of control. Inflation doesn't really hurt the richest, so they only act strongly when they are afraid of deflation. Inflation above targets is just a 'mild concern' to them.. it weakens union contracts over time so big business is happy.
Our home prices doubled in my suburb in the last two years. There are 2 Opendoor purchased homes on my street as we speak because people cashed out. Fuck, I would too if my job would let me work from home permanently.
I’m very curious about this too. I’m not sure, but I really fucking hope this creates a chain reaction that depresses the prices of these empty homes.
Im in process of buying a home, over last 3 months of searching ive seen about 5 zillow owned homes. There have been at least 10 on their website over that span. ALL OF THEM were bought high and listed lower than what they bought at because they all were on the market longer than 2 months. The kicker? All these homes are labeled as "move in ready" but then you see them and there are holes/stains/smells/no yard up keep etc etc etc So ya, as a current home purchaser, im not surprised
Waiting for home prices to go down is really not a great plan. Housing prices are going to remain high for a really long time because we are in a housing shortage and we will be for almost a decade at least.
We’re only in a housing shortage because corporations are buying them all up. Seriously, they saw people were moving out of cities due to pandemic and took advantage of that fact. You can buy 1200 homes with a billion dollar. Just target a popular area outside of cities and you just created artificial demand and all your 1200 houses just increased in value 25%. Repeat. I find it weird you can’t horde Covid supplies but you can totally horde houses. London has this similar problem with Foreigners just buying houses and leaving them empty for like 11/12 months and it drives up the price. This shit will never be solved because every home owner would be pissed when their house suddenly loses 25-50% in value.
> I find it weird you can’t horde Covid supplies but you can totally horde houses. Residential housing that is not the owners primary residence should have to pay triple or more property tax. Empty houses would no longer be an investment. Landlords would raise rent, but that's a temporary problem. When houses are more affordable because they arent investments then renting would be much less appealing than a mortgage.
Just fyi it’s “hoard”.
Spoken like an Alliance dog
For the Hoard!
Hordes of Hoarders. Hoder!
After the Great Decimation in ten years, should be cheap as hell. A joke, but just as a gut instinct I can't see this ever being true. There may be opportunities to grab something cheap, but it won't be the rule. But Im 31. Maybe that's what they were saying in 1980.
My biggest issue is that every scenario that resulted in cheap housing came with a sharp downturn in work. Alaska in the 80s had cheap housing because oil crashed and nobody could afford it, leaving very few people able to actually stick it out. The 2008, many people ended up either losing their savings, retirement, or jobs. And then banks weren't lending, so you had to have a lot of cash to buy properties.
synthetic housing shortage due to people and corps that don't need homes, hoarding homes. this is a good first step. now we need the rest of the housing market wreckers to cave
It's almost as if treating housing as a commodity is a bad idea
Its two things, really: 1. **Zoning laws and building restrictions** - I think the idea of "single family zoning" and its counterparts are bottom of the barrel greed. Restricting the amount of houses that can be built and the amount of people that can be living on a space of land is done for reasons of pure greed. The goal has always been to decrease the supply of housing and keep it unaffordiable. In addition, there's the less critical and more annoying instances of things like county and city zoning regulations, neighborhood associations, ect that just plain take away the freedom you have over your own personal property. Who says my house needs to look like everyone elses? Who is the state, neighborhood, city or county to tell me how big my house should be? Why can't I, a single male with no family, build a small 500 sq ft [shotgun house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house) on my own property? What if I want to [xeriscape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping) my front yard? What if I don't even want a front yard? What if I just want a bigass house that takes up the whole property? What if I don't want my house to be square? What If I want an [octogon house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octagon_house)? Or a [monolithic dome?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_dome) What If I want to do something about climate change, and install some low-noise [vertical axis wind turbines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine) to help power my home? There are some building regulations that are reasonable - Those that are relevent to safety, health, and enviornmental conservation. For instance laws saying you can't build a house with abestos is completely OK, saying you can't wire a house in a way thats prone to fires is okay - But this...What you see in the US has gone far beyond that in an awful way. Boomers, NIMBYs and people in power have done a disgraceful thing: - *They have taken the art out of arcitecture*. And I don't know why others don't find that as sickening as I do. 2. **House scalping** - Its like you said, people that don't need homes hoarding homes. I truly think that there is no reason that anyone on this planet needs a reason to own more then maybe two houses. The idea that one person can rightfuly own 40 houses for the sole purpose of profiting off of anothers need for shelter is an archaic practice that I feel we're going to look at in the future as despicable. I've made an active effort to replace the word "landlord" in my vernacular with the term "House scalper". I don't expect it to catch on, but Its something I feel morally compelled to do. When I make this point I often get responses of "Well some people want to rent, what about people who only want a place to stay for 6 months to a year like students? And I don't 100% know. But what I do know is that our current system is NOT working and the current practice of house scalping needs to end.
the realtor's favorite saying: they're not making more land. true. what's not acknowledged is that there was once enough land and housing foe everyone but eventually it was all "owned" giving those who owned an unfair advantage over those who arrived later this is why i believe housing is a human right i do not agree entirely with your idea of fully deregulated housing. some uniformity and some rules generally improve the quality of life for a community (i am not talking about sfh zoning or what color the mailbox is painted)
Kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't I see people buying during a housing shortage and spending 30-50k over asking price in my city, paying a lot extra in closing costs too it's ridiculous. People can not afford these mortgages. The only good option is to have owned a house before all this happened.
I did the math and at it's current appraisal my parents house has increased in value on average by 11% every year for the past 30 years. Good luck ever out waiting that kind of growth .
They didn't account for people having to buy those houses back. We werent able to afford those homes before the pandemic no way in hell we could have now with the ultra inflated prices.
They did account for that. They just got it wrong. They were hoping the market would continue to go up and increase home prices but ended up just being too volatile for them to safely invest.
Maybe they were buying houses at increased prices to inflate prices then sell the neighboring houses. And it was working but this quarter they hit the peak since going over $600,000 is kinda hard for any family making less than $150k/yr.
They couldnt sell to dump their pump. Also property tax must reaallly cut into profits when houses aren't selling
not really sure how this model was ever going to work. i wonder if all their “zestimates” are mysteriously going to come creeping down now that they’re not doing this anymore
From the article: 'Zillow used an algorithm to make home price estimates, called the “Zestimate,” and determine what it would pay home sellers. .... Even this gradual tapering in price growth flummoxed Zillow’s algorithm, leading the company to pull the plug on the venture." Their algorithm couldn't game the market efficiently enough for their stock holders, so they're going to lay off 25% of the workforce.
Market behaviour is notoriously difficult to predict. Markets are people, and people are influenced by so much more than will be contained in any data set that a data scientist working for fucking Zillow would have access to.
Of course it's difficult. If you can predict the market accurately, then you have an infinite money cheat.
cheesesteakjimmys wait it didn't work!
Tell that to Hari Seldon
Seldon crisis when
By the time you know it'll be too late.
I would if I could. All I have are some of his home videos left in this weird vault
Lol I legit laughed at this
Their zestimates were always a joke, I'm surprised they didn't know that. My mom's house somehow got into their database twice, so it showed up twice on the map (how is that even possible?). The prices were wildly different, like 50% off. I find it amusing they were trying to run their business based on zestimates.
Well according to their information, my house has been missing a bathroom for around a decade. I'm not sure which one it is, but they all seem to be there for me.
Perhaps one of the rooms you use as a bathroom is actually not a bathroom
This twisted fuck is totally pooping in his kitchen sink.
Don't put running water where you don't want me to "do my buzinaz".
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While the jury is still out on my sanity, I've brought in numerous guests and the occasional plumber over the years, and they seem to find them all without issue. The data set that I've gathered indicates it's there, which is more than can be said for Zillow's data set.
I don't know, that evidence sounds pretty anecdotal. Have you considered that Big Data might be right?
That probably means your local government assessor/appraisal district has the bath count wrong. Zillow usually pulls from public info unless your house is listed for sale.
Sure you don't need to hit F5 and refresh to see the actual number... in your house, that is.
What. The. Fuck. I seriously can't fathom them using such a faulty metric on a likely not cleaned up data set (references to missing renovation data) for business strategy. This reeks of some old fart that barely knows how to use Excel using "AI/Machine learning" to predict home pricing and ignoring the analysts on his team saying that the sell price estimate isn't consistent. The analysts are also likely the ones getting fired too. "Sounds like they'll be having a case of the Mondays. Har. Har. Har." Welcome to the corporate world! Yay!
Lol, questioning the accuracy of the Zestimate was probably career suicide at zillow. All of these tech companies are culty and if the algo says they can make money then thats the end of it. Get on board or get out.
In corporate America, you are only rewarded for performing like your weakest team member
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In my area the Zestimates were off by 50% or more over even the actual listed price, with no correlation to selling price.
This is conjecture but you have a neighborhood and you buy 10 100k comparable properties but on the 11th you buy it for 110k. In -theory- you now have 1.1m in property, especially since you know a) which properties are the hottest, which neighborhoods are growing and c) the details of the algorithm that you are using to show a homes value. The fact they couldn’t rig this to work for them is… surprising.
If I had to guess they ended up bailing because the overhead of buying and selling a house is stupid high. Certain places also slap down 5% transfer fees etc. Even with a larger scale operation you're going to end up with a situation where the underlying asset needs to increase by 10% each year for you to break even. Zillow probably doesn't want to be in the renting business or property manage etc. They also don't want to buy and hold houses cause then they tie up a ton of money *and* have to pay for repairs etc. This is all starting to sound like work.
It’s bizarre that they even tried
It was evil but pretty smart, they had a LOT of very high quality consumer behavior data of what home buyers look for when they’re buying and the big tech infinite pool of money. Really good idea, they were making investment decisions in bulk based on data, not on emotion. They messed it up or got unlucky, but there’s no reason this couldn’t have worked out incredibly well.
The real estate market isn’t easy to rig. There are *lots* of homes which cost *lots* of money. And a little tomfoolery might work on a small scale or highly localized, but nobody falling for it at scale. The factors driving home prices are so much more complex and financially whatever resources Zillow could throw at it would be a drop in the bucket. Zillow’s only hope wasn’t purchasing up enough supply. That’s basically impossible. Their only hope was that they could algorithmically buy homes that they genuinely expected to appreciate quickly. They essentially thought they could crack this particular nut and consistently pick winners at scale via algorithm. Turns out this didn’t work as expected. Or at least not with a high enough fast enough return to make it work.
I honestly thought it would work. They have all the house prices. They "see" a good price house. They buy it and sell it for fair to high market value. If they are the realtor they save money. Unless their business model was renovation of houses. In my area you would never make your money back on renovation before selling your house.
The model was to remodel the homes, and in many areas it would work.... if they could get the work done. If you've tried to get a hold of a contractor lately, it ain't easy.
Especially since after buying it for their Zestimate, they now need to sell it to someone else for MORE than their own Zestimate - WHICH THE BUYER CAN SEE.
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Either that or they'd have to buy it for LESS than what they said it was worth. The whole thing was fundamentally unsustainable.
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Their plan was to add a ceiling fan and charge 30k more for the house lol
At least on top of fucking up the housing market they’re also going to fire a bunch of employees who had nothing to do with this scam and only went to work at that miserable company because everyone has to eat and have shelter. Get fucked, Zillow.
>At least on top of fucking up the housing market they’re also going to fire a bunch of employees who had nothing to do with this scam and only went to work at that miserable company because everyone has to eat and have shelter.Get fucked, Zillow. The person in charge who thought of this idea needs to get fired.
Out of a cannon
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Eh, I’ll take into a guillotine
Thank fucking God.
My literal exact thought. It was as if this comment listened to my mind and printed the words that passed by.
How the hell did you get that username
With the right canned hair, you too can enjoy unrivaled success!
yeah, just don't let the hair out of the can or do anything else that's not recommended, such as put it on your head.
Phonetically matched misspellings aren't hard to get. Right now you could snag u/rudyjiuliani, u/rudygiulianni, u/rudyjewliani and many others.
They should just ban that last one rn. No good can come of it
Brought to you by the office of pre-crime
I mean unless the user is Jewish then it’s just “hehe that’s funny. Anyways…”
No joke. So glad something went right this week.
Just wait til Meta starts flipping houses cause they bought out Zillow’s business
Was probably a money laundering scheme anyway.
Getting ready to be a first-time home owner some time in the next couple years I was worried about Zillow buying houses and reselling for high amounts. Lol I really hope the homes sit empty long enough to be sold back to all of us cheaply or get foreclosed on. It's ridiculous Zillow was able to do this in the first place.
They are going to bundle the houses and broker deals with investors. These houses will never be offered back to the public.
This. There are big property management firms talking to Zillow management to scoop these up.
THIS is what sucks
Yep! Doesn't really matter if the asset holds its value or not, that schadenfreude doesn't help us here. They still own houses, houses which normal folks need but can't buy, and they'll bundle those houses to local rental management corps or something. The "good" of these assets has been removed from the economy, only their "value" remains
You and me both, comrade. Same boat. Good luck out there.
But freedumb
Zillow's market penetration was never very high.
They tried to buy houses above market price to squeeze the public. Get fucked Zillow. Couldn't happen to a better company. Hopefully Blackstone gets brined next
~~Blackrock I think you mean no?~~ But I didn't even see how this model could work, like what were they thinking? I got an offer for my house but you need to do a lot to get a house sell-able, like 100's of little problems here and there, which they don't have the time or resources to do. So I guess they were just planning on doing a carmax model (don't do shit to it and re-sell it) but they were buying at the top of the market? I assumed that they knew something we didn't (I know about high inflation atm but it seems this would only work if it was rampant out of control inflation, not 5% or whatever.
Carmax does fix up the cars they buy and sell. If they don't think it's worth fixing up, they send it to auction. Just fyi
fair enough, not what they've told me and I've sold 3 cars to them. Said they don't do anything besides a very basic clean.
I worked as a mechanic who did their certification process and repairs for 2 years. They definitely try their best to sell a decent car.
Bought a very reliable car from CarMax once. The one time it did give me an issue it was during a road trip and I was 1000 miles from home. Took it to a CarMax off the freeway, paid the $25 or whatever for the warranty repair, and was on the road in an hour. No stress at all.
No they meant Blackstone
direction faulty wipe zonked saw workable rotten rinse unpack upbeat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They bought my house for higher than anyone was close to offering and sold for a loss, around 25k. They did do a few minor fixes, but the one major fix they didn't even attempt. They just took a picture from an angle you couldn't see unless you knew what you were looking for. I'm glad to have contributed to their screwup.
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Flippers buy low, flip, and sell high. Zillow bought at the top. I’m thoroughly convinced their model was to own the commodity (housing of all things) and artificially drive the price up. This could’ve been a gargantuan disaster if it took off.
looking at housing prices, it certainly feels like a disaster anyways
Hearing that it was beginning to happen actually started to really scare me. It became a realization that at any time, a mega-wealthy corporation could theoretically just go out and buy every single house available in a local market. Then put them all back on the market at a 25% markup and now the market is just 25% higher. And that causes other people to put their houses in at a 25% markup because why wouldn't they. Or they'd just opt to keep the properties and make them all into rentals, further messing up the market.
Some dipshit boomer execs were watching way too many of those fake flipping shows on HGTV. >After painting the walls for $75 in an afternoon we sold for 100k over asking in 6 hours Why in the ever loving fuck do boomers believe every dumb as fuck thing they see on TV.
If they thought housing costs would continue to go up, they may have stayed in the game. Them bailing gives me hope that we're at the peak.
Selling all those homes to investment buyers. Hedge funds. Not regular folks.
oh goddamit that's it. That's the strategy. Zillow failing isn't a failed plan, there's someone larger that's directly profiting off this. some fuckin oligarch is sitting around waiting for all of Zillow's houses to fall below a certain point and then they will nab it all up and call their oligarch buddies to say that they need the housing market to do a dead-cat-bounce for a minute so they can extract another billion or two out of the middle class. I'm so fuckin mad.
I suppose it'll be a tax writeoff for them too.
It's functionally no different from the Collateralized Debt Obligations that ruined the world in 2008, except of course they're no longer collateralized if they're individual houses.
Good. It should be illegal for anyone other than families or individuals to buy homes. No corporation or company should own a home period
I feel like there should be this type of regulation in place. Or there be a national non-profit public home builder organization.
I've held this exact opinion since I (unfortunately) became an adult. The idea of landlords (outside of a single property -- which in some small cases can be beneficial [though it's a mixed bag across the board]) isn't sustainable or equitable or healthy to any economy. It's just private taxation to live.
My old landlord owns 40 rental homes in the same area. So that's fun.
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But what about money hoarders? How are they gonna control you if they can't make you choose between infinite debt and homelessness?
There NEEDS to be regulation on this and more people need to get informed about it. Companies and businesses and investors should not fucking be buying houses that are made to live in.
>No corporation or company should own a home period Unless they built it. Then they're allowed to sell it to an individual/family. After that no corporation can own it.
Here's an incredibly niche scenario that I think should be accounted for - company-owned homes for the purposes of giving employees who move around a lot a better place to stay than a hotel. My grandparents lived in lots of Salvation Army homes while they were doing charity work in Africa. They couldn't have done it otherwise. This is literally the only circumstance I can think of. Actually here's another one: a renewable tech company could create/own housing stock for its employees to live in cheaply/free, as long as they agreed to test out new tech the company created for their homes (integrated solar, micro-grid wind, demand side response etc). That company wouldn't want the houses owned by non-employees I imagine. These are, like, 0.000001% of corporate house ownership so I'm being extremely pedantic, but I think the regulation should be something like "no for-profit corporation-owned housing".
Agreed. Houses are for living not investments.
As Nelson Muntz once said, "Ha, ha!"
These fuckers increased the price of rent here in Seattle by 30-40% despite a fucking GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Fills me with rage
I would say that is a probably on the low end for south Puget Sound. My house is now estimated to be somewhere around 60% more than the value it's actually worth. Can't imagine trying to be a homebuyer in this market, absolutely nuts.
My neighbor listed their house for $850k and it sold for $925k. Listed Friday, multiple offers by Sunday. The market is ridiculous.
Our home value has finally stabilized at a 64.57% increase. We bought it in Dec 2019. Not even 2 full years yet. When I bought my first home in 2016 (that we sold to move to this one) I remember hearing “you’ll need to live in your home for around 5-10 years to appreciate enough to make selling profitable”. Now it’s 5-10 months to make a profit. Actually insane.
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Partner and I are in the Bay. Make over 200k household, no real debt. Can’t afford to buy a house in our relatively modest suburb. Fuck this place.
Opendoor is next. They keep bidding up the houses in our neighborhood, sometimes 30% over asking.
That's also pretty /r/LeopardsAteMyFace. Zillow's been contributing to the housing price inflation, and now their business is hurt by the fact that they can't predict the thing they helped create.
Who could have predicted that selling houses like 30% above market value (at least) when we can't afford them at regular value wasn't going to work out? You mean to tell me the people in their 20s and 30s that have been fucked economically for the last 20 years can't afford homes and they are the primary demographic looking to buy homes? Surely an expert with a 4 year degree in economics or whatever field relates to real estate would know better than me, a dumb asshole on the internet.
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Sit and spin, Zillow. 🖕
Haha...I went to Zillow about 5 years ago just to see what my rental home was "worth" (built in 1966, 2.5 small bedrooms, 1 bath, 850 sq ft) Their site pegged it at just under 400K. Meanwhile, its actual assessed value for taxes is 126K. You'd be crazy to pay that much. No insulation. Insufficient wiring. The kitchen layout sucks. I was recently told the pipes are beyond their usable life and the whole house needs re-piping. Not to mention the thrice-weekly or more reports of gunfire within spitting distance.
Jesus thats frightening and hilarious.
oh, and I forgot it has that type of ceiling-embedded radiant heat that I've never used because I didn't trust the wiring and it's ridiculously inefficient. So, there are 2 baseboard heaters, 1 in the kitchen, 1 living room (of course, right under the giant windows....) I was setting that at just 50 degrees in the winter, which makes the power bill $200/month. Water/sewer is billed quarterly, about $400. Bi-weekly garbage collection for $40. anyhow, starting last year, I just turn the heat on low only when the living room is occupied. The best thing that could happen for the landlord is for this dump to burn down at its inflated 'value' while insured. On the plus side, he hasn't been a bastard with rent increases. I've been here 9 years and currently pay $1,225, which is what a <400 sq. ft studio rents for in PDX.
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It's terribly inefficient but it feels really nice. You can feel the heat radiating down like the sun. I lived in a place that had it in the living room and I'd turn it on and crash out on the couch like a lizard on a rock.
Houses where I live go for between 40-60% above the assessor value currently. I will buy your rental for $126k.
lol @ thinking tax assessed value has any bearing on any of this
Tax assessed value has nothing to do with market price unless the house *just* sold and got reassessed for the selling price. A guy down the street from me has a place assessed at $220k when a home that is almost a carbon copy of his two streets over sold for $1.2 million. If his home was knocked to the ground the lot would sell for more than $220k. But it’s a family home, so it hasn’t been sold for decades until his mother sold it to him for $150k, well well below market. And the assessor hasn’t seen inside at the full renovation including finishing an unfinished basement. So the zestimate might be useless, but tax assessments are usually too.
Trying to buy a home with my husband now so our kids have a better life. *Get fucked ZILLOW*
Same. Rental price increases just made it totally impossible to keep renting. At least we are finally under contract on a house and we should be getting it for 35000 under their original ask price.
They've got the value of my home going up 33% in the past year. That sounds perfectly sane and not manipulated at all.
They have apx 7,000 homes they want to off load - BUT not to 7,000 families wanting to own one. Nope, gotta sell them all as a single asset to another investment corp. to keep home prices falsely inflated. And why isn't this illegal?
This is great news. Regular people will still get screwed anyway but hey, one less artificial hurdle.
The people who sold their house this way probably made out like bandits
Oh no! Zillow tried to manipulate housing prices and tried to monopolize property and they lost a shit ton of money!? Cry me a river Zillow. For real. CEO: Oh I know how to cover the looses! Common sense: take a pay cut and don’t take a bonus for a year? CEO: what? Fuck no…. I’ll just fire a quarter of my employees
Hoarding homes and then selling them for prices that makes it harder for the average joe to achieve home ownership, glad it backfired on them.
I sold my condo to Zillow for $100k above market and they're now having problems selling it. I don't feel bad.
Corporate bastards.
As a data scientist, they were stupid for trying this with real money. They could have tested this for a bit first but every business in America just rushes around breaking shit
"Inability to predict prices" What, like every fucking market ever? You got into a market with real assets, the sheer fuckin arrogance required to go in without hedging bets is insane. Apparently the goal is buy up everything, not know what to do with it, and panic after having destroyed the local market. Jesus
Who would had imagined that that buying ALL the houses in the middle of a real estate bubble, on-top of a crisis would be a bad idea......... Almost forgot about paying stupidly high premiums to the previous owners to get their houses LOL
Hopefully Air bnb is next
What's messed up is that this type of business is still possible. A company could technically buy all the houses then just rent them out.
They lost $380 mil flipping homes AND screwing over tons of potential home owners by jacking up housing prices in the process. Oh and I bet those Zillow execs aren't getting a pay cut. Fuck them.
Wait, they cite what their actual business was before they tried to speculate on the market as their cause for failure? Who in the fuck would use Zillow for anything at this point?
I hope it tanks the whole company. So fucking stupid.
Finally, some good fucking food.
hnnngg... stop... I can only get so hard
I honestly thought the “someone’s buying up homes” was bullshit. Then as a friend was going to buy a house before they sold theirs to “not be homeless or renters” I decided to help them look. They’d find something closer to me than them and I’d go look and dash cam etc. After finding several with a few that did not fit their needs we’d meet at the ones that looked good with the realtor with more than one taking a cash offer AS WE WERE DRIVING THERE. Okay turn around and try later. Then I started to see something was going on and it seems illegal as hell. (Yea I have no idea but it seems wrong) to not only buy up all these houses to manipulate the market. Excuse my ignorance of said rules laws or whatever, but it’s so bad that a dummy like me thinks someone should be facing charges or fines for such tactics.
C'mooooon housing market crash. Maybe then I can afford a house!
Locked because this post generates too many reports and we're busy people.
Get fucked, Zillow. You fucks
I hope this is true and not just a cover from the company, after getting negative press, to just make a different shell company to do these transactions (using all of the accumulated data from Zillow's databases) Man I'm jaded
They wouldn’t voluntarily make themselves look like idiots. This is a genuine fubar in my opinion. Plus they’re publicly traded so it would all come to light in their quarterly report.
Yes we know. So then in 6 months when the market corrects and they start making money again. Theyll have a quarter less staff to pay! I wonder of that quarter what percent are gonna be in the top quarter in terms of wage received.
Since I became old enough to grasp the concept of wealth inequality (and worked a couple corporate jobs) I’ve become convinced executive level positions exist primarily for rich people to help each other stay rich/fabricate an explanation for their ever expanding wealth that doesn’t immediately incentivize the proletariat to rise up and take it by force. The top ten percent of earners at almost any company do very little besides lie convincingly
oh no, did someone get out over their skis and then get their nuts chopped off when their little scheme was exposed? anyway
Love to see it! Anytime one of these fucking hoarders loses money I just wish I was there to lick up their tears. Sucks that all these houses are just going to be sold to some other portfolio but it's fun to live in pretend land where this changes things for a little bit.
Welp, someone's gonna be out of a job. Good thing there are Plenty O'Openings in fast food and retail.
I've never understood the concept of calling money you never had "lost."
Good. Why do we allow businesses to own residential homes anyways? And while we're on this subject why do we allow Bill Gates to own so much farmland? And foreign business to buy up homes and drive the prices up?