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It's been my experience that agents tend to be very gun shy when it comes to giving advice. They like to point out factual things (these cabinets are made of oak, etc.) but if it gets into anything subjective it seems like they're afraid to even offer an opinion. I don't know if it's a fear of a lawsuit or something else. I've also never had one who had any useful information about what a particular property would rent for.

I also think there's a little bit of a conflict of interest for any agent involved in any transaction. Whether an agent is representing the seller or the buyer, in almost all cases he/she only gets paid if a deal closes. At first blush, you think "well, the agent's on my side." Certainly a seller might think, "well, the more I sell the house for, the more the agent gets paid, so surely he/she'll want to sell it for as much as possible." But in reality, it seems like it's in the selling agent's best interest to convince the seller to sell it for as little as possible, and for the buying agent to convince the buyer to offer as much as possible, since even large differences in price (say $10K) only amount to a small difference in the commission, while not having a deal go through would mean no commission at all.

That all being said, however, I do find them to be useful whenever I'm looking at an MLS-listed property. I just try to remember what they will and will not tell me and keep their motivation in the back of my mind. I can't imagine a scenario, though, where I would want one when I was looking to buy a house that wasn't listed on the MLS.

That's just one example of how zillow can be wrong. It also seems to use sales within a particular distance from the home, but as we all know there can be significant differences between two adjacent neighborhoods.

I guess what I'm saying is that, sure, zillow uses comps, but it does so indiscriminately. True comps will evaluate comparable houses (not just size and number of different rooms, but truly comparable including some of the more subjective things). You need a knowledgeable human being (perhaps yourself) to do some selection.

Zillow is nice because it gives you sale prices. You can actually go in and re-do the estimate for your own purposes. You can select the houses to be used as comps and you can manually adjust for other factors. I do this quite a bit on zillow, but the numbers I get are often very different from the initial "zestimate."

What you won't be able to get are sale prices that are under contract but not closed, or those that are closed but haven't been added into the online databases yet.

I think one problem with zillow is that it does not consider the condition of the property. It can actually result in values appearing to go down when they are really doing just the opposite.

Imagine an area that investors are slowly targeting. Over a period of time investors are coming in, buying really run-down houses, rehabbing and reselling. This will, on the average, improve the value of all of the houses in the area because the worst houses are finally getting fixed up and turned into some of the nicest, but zillow will be averaging in all of those low-ball purchase prices to make it look like property values are declining. Eventually, as these investors sell the houses at true market value, the zillow estimate should improve.

You might be the perfect candidate for a dome home:

http://www.monolithic.com/gallery/homes/index.html

http://www.earthhomes.co.uk/Introduction.htm

I can't find the other site I had seen once that focused on building the dome yourself.

I've noticed several times where it comes in fairly high and the seller spots this "appraisal" and uses it as part of the marketing strategy. Just be careful if the seller is directing you towards zillow. It may be the only way he/she can justify an otherwise overpriced position.

Is there any difference in the final results? Will spray-painted walls look any different? What about trim work? Is it just painted the same as everything else, or would you tape it off separately or paint it by hand later?

It sounds from your post that you're not sure why you are buying this house. Is it for you to move into and live in, or is it for you to rent out? If you are going to rent it out, most of what you talk about in your post is largely irrelevant. You need to start looking at numbers -- what (realistically) will it rent for, what are the expenses going to be, etc. You need to make sure that you are getting into a money-making deal. Take a look at the property analysis tool on this site to get some idea of the numbers you need to look at.

Now, if you are planning to live in it, then it's a whole different game and you need to consider a bunch of subjective things and how they mesh with your personal tastes and desires. If you do plan to live here, and rent out your current residence, then you need to analyze your current residence to help you decide if it's worth keeping as a rental or if your money would be better spent elsewhere.

When I try it on a phone number it says it finds data, but that there's a charge if I want to actually see that data.

The problem is that Pinnacle was a scam, and the people that ran it spent the money (or a lot of it, anyway). They may have $5 million (or more) in assets, but they owe something like $30 million to investors. The government came in, took over everything and is trying to get investors as much of their money back as possible. Mr. Hays was appointed by the court to do this -- he had nothing to do with Pinnacle when it was operational. He's on your side, trying to find as much of the money as possible so he can distribute it to the investors who were wronged. Mr. Hays is quite professional, the people that operated Pinnacle, of course, are not.

Be sure to read the stuff on his website:

http://www.haysconsulting.net/pinnacle.html

It depends upon what you buy the houses for and what you sell them for (as well as what you do with any profit). Assuming you don't go up in total amount borrowed (or total loan length) from house to house, and assuming you are making a true profit each time, and assuming you apply that profit to the mortgage, then yes, you will pay off your house more quickly.

For this to work, though, the profit needs to be from your improvements (repairs) and not appreciation. Appreciation won't do you any good -- while you will get more when you sell the house, the next house that you buy will (all things being equal) have gone up too, costing you more. Thus, it would be equal, financially.