Thought I'd start a post to show the new heat map feature on Zillow that charts their Zestimate price per square foot. They cover all the major cities. Here's the one for San Diego:
This is really cool! Can anyone grab a heat map every week. The maps can be put into a video and we can all see this map turn blue in 2 years. Can we get historical charts from Zillow also?
I find the “heat map” totally misleading. It simply shows
the price/sqft across neighborhoods. This number has got
nothing to do with the “heat” or hotness of the market. It
just shows which part of town has the most expensive houses.
Big deal.
I do however like Sparkey’s idea of making a movie out of
it. But there is still the problem that the resolution of
the price/color map can be 5, 10 or 100(!) % per step in the
color grade depending on the price/sqft range, for example,
$750-799, $800-899 and (!) $1000-1999.
What we need is a map of home price delta (change) from
mo-mo, with a fine resolution on the color scale.
And what about Zestimates? Are they not partly made up based
on input from daydreaming property owners?
Here’s a question to you all: Does Zillow pander to the
homeowners, or are they a neutral dispenser of price
information?
The use of the “heat map” to show “hot” or “cold” real estate markets would be a kind of silly, especially, when the markets are generally cooling. I assume the heat maps are frequently updated, so the updates can be compared side by side to the previously saved maps, showing the trend of local markets. It looks good as a wall decor too…
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