House prices going up cause of software or people

In the US, the financial industry has access to capital at an effective interest rate of 0%, they are rumored to be buying up real estate en masse, with the strategy of forcing everyone to become renters.

They've previously bought up a large portion of the mobile home parks and rapidly raised the rents on people who usually have no options to move.

From what I've heard, it sounds like homes are actually selling over these Zestimates still.

Also, comparing the zestimate for our house to what other homes are actually selling for are pretty comparable. I think what you're saying might be true for some markets, but I don't think it's deliberate. Zillow's been around for a while, and those Zestimates didn't used to be anywhere near as high as they jumped this past year.

Also, the Zestimates actually seemed to be a lagging indicator for last year, like they went up more slowly than the sold house prices (I was watching mine 2-3 times a month out of curiosity, although that's just one anecdote).

I don't think so. In Canada (e.g. Toronto), we don't have proper access to pricing data for houses (some kind of real-estate agent monopoly but I don't fully understand it). That lack of pricing data makes things worse.

I just bought a house. The estimates are below market value. I placed offers on 6 properties and none of them closed below list. The listing price is the starting bid price.

Locally, houses are selling on average about 10% over list.

Of the problems in housing prices, I really doubt Zillow is changing anything. Everyone knows the listing prices are garbage, and only work off closing price for comps. The issue is closing dates are 30-60 days behind the current market, which is a long time.

It's essentially impossible to know what a fair offer is today.

I've looked at zillow a fair amount over the years* and they are always consistently higher than actual sales data. I don't think based on my own observations that they are causing anything. They are 1 site and the vast majority of transactions are between people.

* It can be fun to revisit places you lived/stayed at and see what changed, if its been listed in the last decade. Kinda like a before/after on home improvement shows with your memory being the before.

My house has gone up 28% in the past year and grew only a bit slower the prior year. Contrary to what everybody on west coast yells emotionally it has nothing to do with shortages, actually it’s the opposite.

In my past experience on HN this subject tends to become exceedingly emotional very quickly. Please do not reply to me about high economics with 0 data.

I live in the third fastest growing large city in the US. It has doubled in population over the past 20 years and may become one of the US 10 largest cities over the next decade. There is plenty of room to expand here with constant construction and no geographic or political boundaries. Property prices seem to increase proportionally to the increase of housing quantity as though increased quantity is fueling increased demand. Multi tenant properties only seem to pop up here once an area becomes to saturated with single family residences leaving higher density units as the only remaining option.

Despite there being very low financial barriers to becoming a home owner here it seems an incredibly high quantity of single family homes are rentals.

Software-aided humans. The market is optimized to lazy investors and idealists right now. Hopefully they lose buckets of money and abandon their hustles and the rest of us can buy homes soon.

I think the zestimate for my house would be probably 10% over what I think a high asking price would be. That would be over a 50% increase in 6 years.

Houses are selling for more than asking all over the Western world.

In many places you can offer the asking price and will be rejected as the seller is expecting more.

The customers for Zillow are the realtors themselves (and not buyers or speculators).