CalBears96 said:
Mety said:
Yes, they can manipulate zestimates, but when they make an offer to buy from you, they wouldn?t just make a $1m home into zestimating $800k or something. The price range would be a reasonable ballpark, don?t you think? The benefit of selling to Zillow would be for someone who wants to quickly sell it without doing all those staging, open house, etc. Just take an offer and be done with it less than 2 week. If your looking for maximum ROI, then yeah just go through traditional style.
There are also some people who need to sell the current home quickly in order to close the new home, so the quickest way is through Zillow.
Yes, this is the primary selling point of these services.
When I sold my last home, I got quotes or attempted to get quotes from all the iBuyers - Zillow, Redfin, Open Door, Owning, and also a private home flipper - just to see how the quotes would compare. I had an amount in mind that I would be willing to sell for if it meant avoiding staging and marketing the home (I have four kids, so keeping things looking perfect all the time is near impossible).
Redfin ended up offering me the most, and it was almost enough to make me pull the trigger, but I instead opted for a traditional listing to net the most money after fees. I was able to close on our new house before selling the old, something I wasn't positive mortgage underwriting would allow me to do, and I was able to sell the old house before the first payment came due on the new house.
For people that need the certainty of selling their existing home first, iBuying is a nice service, but it comes with a high price. At the end of the day, losing tens of thousands in net proceeds was not worth the added convenience for me.