All Forum Posts by: Michael Merino

I find all of this helpful. My basic conclusion is:

* We can't trust the data.
* Sometimes certain events like foreclosure transfers get posted as sales.
* There's always opportunities. It's OK to ignore the asking price and to look at other driving prices. But don't get distracted by the super low sale prices which likely aren't correct anyways.

I don't want to link to any specific house. Just go into the recently sold listings of Zillow, and you'll frequently see various homes that were sold obviously far below market value. For example, in San Francisco, I see a 4 bed 3 bath house sold for $650k when the homes in the area normally sell in the $3M range.

The one example I'm thinking about is when parents "sell" to children, they will artificially lower the price. Is that the only reason? Or are there others? I wonder how Zillow knows to filter out those data points when doing trend analysis.

We've all done those Zillow/RedFin searches for recent home sales and seen purchases for homes sold significantly below market. Here in San Francisco, they might be a million dollars or more below market. Do we know where those come from? I have my suspicions. But I want to make sure I'm not missing out on any opportunities to acquire houses for below market that others are aware of.