Zillow vs. MRIS: Who do you believe?

• March 16th 2009

by Mark Wellborn

Trulia, Zillow, MRIS, Redfin. The list of sites where you can go to get real estate sales and appraisal information seems to be growing by the day. In an interesting post, local blog Bubble Meter weighs the pros and cons of Zillow and MRIS after both sites offered widely differing data regarding home prices in Prince William County.

According to Bubble Meter, MRIS is saying that “inflation-adjusted” home prices in the Virginia county are back at pre-bubble levels. However, data from Zillow suggests that prices are well above the prices before the bubble burst.

Bubble Meter points out that MRIS is a measure of actual sales while Zillow is measuring its own appraisals. So, if the appraisals are off (apparently they frequently are) then the Zillow data is wrong.

However, the home valuation site does have its advantages. From the post:

“Zillow is closer to being a constant-quality index than MRIS. A significant amount of the drop in MRIS’s measured prices may come from the fact that far more smaller homes have been going into foreclosure than bigger homes. That means smaller homes are selling, which suggests that some of the price decline on the MRIS graph is due to the changing mix of homes for sale. MRIS may be overestimating the decline in overall housing value in Prince William County (and the entire D.C. area).”

Who do you trust? Let us know in the comments section.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/zillow_vs_mris_who_do_you_believe/671.