AVM - Putting Home-Value Tools To The Test

Playing with online home-appraisal sites like Zillow is a great game. Simply plug in your address to find what the site says your house is worth. The real fun is checking on your friends' homes -- and your neighbors’. But are these electronic wizards -- called automated valuation models (AVMs) in real-estate lingo -- real The market value of a house is what a buyer will pay for it. An accurate estimate comes as close as possible to the market price. As is turns out, even the BEST of the online AVMs only had a 50% chance of being within 5% of the likely sales price.

Being right just half the time might get a human appraiser fired. Yet, in the world of online AVMs, this is top performance.

Here’s how six popular online home-valuation AVMs compare: Click here for the full story (MSNBC) Appraisal , Real Estate , Appraiser , Technology