Is your Zillow Zestimate accurate?
Last updated August 19, 2026
No. Not for your house, anyway.
Believe it or not, the CEO of Zillow sold his own house for $1,050,000 in February 2016. His company's Zestimate on that same house said $1,750,000. He sold for roughly 40% under the number his own engineers built. And here is the part that should bother you more: the accuracy figure Zillow quotes in public is not the one that applies to your house.
What Zillow itself says about Zestimate accuracy
Zillow publishes two error rates, and almost nobody notices there are two.
For a house that is already listed for sale, the Zestimate lands within 1.83% of what it actually sells for. That is genuinely good, and worth saying out loud. Zillow can see the asking price and often the accepted offer, so it has real numbers to check itself against.
Your house is not listed. For homes like yours, sitting quietly off market, the median error is 7.01%. Same company, same algorithm, nearly four times the miss. That is the number that applies to you, and it is not the one on the screen when you look yourself up.
It also means half of all homes are off by more than that. On a $1,500,000 house, ordinary across Calabasas, Westlake Village and Agoura Hills, 7.01% is $105,150. In either direction. And half of owners are further out than that.
Think about what that does to you in practice. Price too high on a bad number and your listing sits. Buyers watch the days pile up, decide something must be wrong with it, and you end up taking less than if you had priced it right on day one. Price too low and it sells in a weekend, everyone tells you what a great result it was, and you never find out you handed six figures to a stranger at closing.
Both of those look like a normal sale from the inside. That is the problem.
Your real number could sit anywhere in there. That is a $105,150 swing, and half of homes land outside it entirely.
Based on Zillow's own published median error of 7.01% for homes that are not currently listed for sale.
The reason is simple. A Zestimate is built from public records and recent nearby sales, run through a formula. It has never walked through your home. It doesn't know about the kitchen you remodeled, the view from the primary suite, the lot line that makes your yard bigger than the one next door, or the deferred maintenance a real inspection would catch. The CEO's house was an extreme case for a specific reason: Zillow had no access to sold data from the local Seattle MLS, so that Zestimate was running on public records alone.
How a real number actually gets built
No secret sauce. Four steps, and you can run every one of them yourself if you want to.
1. Comps that actually match your house
Recent closed sales on your side of the boulevard. Same style, same lot type, same view or lack of one, same school boundary. A formula draws a circle around your address and averages whatever falls inside it. That is how a house backing the freeway ends up priced next to one backing open space. Get the comps for your house.
2. An honest read on what is dated
Roof, systems, windows, kitchen, baths, floors. Buyers do not price a dated kitchen at the cost of a new kitchen. They price it at the cost of a new kitchen plus the hassle of living through one, and they take all of it off your number. No formula sees any of this, because no formula has been inside your house. This is usually the single biggest gap between a Zestimate and reality.
3. Credit for what you already put in
Additions, permits, solar, a redone yard, a finished garage. Public records miss most of it. Every dollar of it stays invisible to a buyer unless somebody puts it in front of them on purpose. Money you already spent, sitting there uncounted.
4. What it would take to actually sell it
The number on its own is half an answer. The other half is the plan. What to fix and what to leave alone, because some repairs return nothing. The price band that pulls competing offers instead of silence. And how the first ten days are run, which is when most of the money is won or lost, long before anyone sits down to negotiate.
Want this run on your own house? Start with the free seller tools, or have us build the number for your address.
Does Zillow still buy homes?
No, not directly. Zillow shut down its own home-buying program, Zillow Offers, in 2021, after its algorithm overbid on thousands of homes and the company took a loss of more than half a billion dollars. Zillow got out of the business of actually buying houses.
What you'll see on Zillow today if you ask for a cash offer comes through a partnership with a separate company, most often Opendoor, not from Zillow itself. Know whose offer you're looking at, and whose fees and repair deductions apply.
How accurate is the Zillow Zestimate?
Zillow's own published figures show a median error rate of around 2% for homes currently listed for sale, and around 7% for homes that are not listed, which includes most homeowners just checking their own home's value.
Does Zillow still make cash offers on homes?
Not directly. Zillow shut down its own home-buying program, Zillow Offers, in 2021 after significant losses. Any cash offer surfaced through Zillow today comes through a partner company, most commonly Opendoor, not from Zillow itself.
Why would my Zestimate be wrong?
It's built from public records and recent nearby sales, not a walkthrough of your actual home. It can miss real things like a finished room, a view, a lot line, or recent upgrades.
What should I use instead of a Zestimate before I sell?
A real valuation that accounts for your home's actual condition and the current market in your specific neighborhood, not just public records and nearby comps.
Summary points
- No. For a house that is not currently listed for sale, which is yours, Zillow's own published median error is 7.01%.
- Zillow publishes two error rates. The good one, 1.83%, applies only to homes already listed for sale, where Zillow can see the asking price. That is not your house.
- The model cannot see inside your house. Condition, finish level, view, noise and layout are exactly what moves price at this end of the market, and none of it is in the data.
- Thin markets make it worse. A model needs recent comparable sales, and in a city with a handful of closings a year there are not enough.
- A real number is built from closed sales, adjusted for the differences between those houses and yours, by someone who has walked both.
- On a $1,500,000 house, 7.01% is $105,150 in either direction, and half of all homes land outside that range entirely. Use a Zestimate as a rough anchor. Do not price a house off it.