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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • “That’s what one real-estate agent claims in a video that went viral on the social-media platform TikTok”

    Hardly a compelling source.

    " he’s suggesting that companies such as Zillow are using the data they glean from people’s perusal of home listings on their sites to make decisions about which houses to buy as iBuyers."

    Based on what exactly? Zillow used publicly available information about houses, just like everyone else does. Zillow traffic patterns had nothing to do with it and really wouldn’t even be useful for that. Buying decisions were based on home value and forecasted ability to resell, not derived interest based on page views.

    “Gotcher later argues that the company will buy 30 homes at one price, and then purchase a 31st home at a higher price. “What that just did is create a new comp,””

    False. Zillow literally excluded houses that it bought from its comps to avoid that bias. I know because I wrote that code.


  • Zillow over payed for houses, then couldn’t sell them as quickly as expected because the COVID housing market took a down turn, and so they sold them at a loss, lost millions of dollars, and closed the house buying business. They also made plenty of low offers or under-payed for houses at times. They were trying to break even on home value on the hole, but couldn’t reign in the wild swings of gains and losses. Their entire business model was based on the seller fees, not on the house value.

    In any case, they closed that business in 2021, and has since sold the rest of their inventory.

    I don’t see how that would have a lasting effect on housing prices though. I’d attribute it more to a housing shortage due to people buying up real estate, and keeping it as rentals. Even when operating, Zillow aimed to resell houses within 3 months, not hold on to them as investments.









  • You are keeping yourself from growing as a person because you would rather block your ears than consider another person’s perspective.

    If you care about making good decisions, you should want to hear other perspectives and make (or revise) your decisions with as much information as possible. Instead, you’ve made up your mind with a bit of information, and refuse to hear more. Science, for example, adjust it’s views based on what is observed. You are refusing to observe so that your current believe can be preserved.

    It’s not even about wanting to “vote D”, I don’t really care about that. It’s about the intellectual dishonesty and laziness of being unwilling to ever change your mind about something to the extent that you push away anything that might make you stop being so lazy and dishonest.