Are online property appraisal services accurate?

No. They are generally used to collect your information for: banks, broker, real estate agents, and insurances all products related to that industry. Big business these days is all about data.

The way to prove this is if they were accurate, the bank would use them themselves. But they don’t, they don’t even use their own product. They still send a physical valuer out to the property to assess your finance. So they obviously don’t trust in their own product. Again they just want to collect your details.

We are seeing a rise in agent comparison websites. Which are basically hijacking the search results but what they actually do is charge a fee. So they pretend that they are finding you the best agent but they don’t actually care. They just want somebody to list it and somebody to sell it whoever that may be just so that they can get paid.

We are seeing similar with review sites doing the same tactics. Even some real estate websites have added reviews so that they can seem more trustworthy. There is that data collection again.

So how do we overcome that?

Get in a couple of local agents. Be upfront with them, say: ‘I just want an idea, I’m not looking at selling’ And should the time come that you do need to sell hopefully you’ve already built trust and a relationship with the agent that’s been helping you with the information that you may need.

I was recently called to a home in Alexandra Hills that had planned a big relocation and job change around an appraisal they had received from an online portal. This had come from an out of area real estate agent that had paid money to be listed on a referral website outside their area of expertise. The owners and I worked through it and turns out the online appraisal was incorrect to the amount of around $100,000. In the end luckily we were still able to make it work, but that added a lot of unnecessary stress to the situation.

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