Garbage In, Garbage Out

One reason the soon to come Realtors Property Resource (RPR) won't work  be any better than Zillow is because it will rely on real estate agents being accurate and consistent in how they define property characteristics.  I'm not just talking about calling a small house cute, but actually getting the factual details correct.

Chicago real estate agents will often list a property as having a garage space when the reality is there is a garage space for rent down the street.  Many agents don't know the difference between a level and a floor.  And what some agents label a "Bedroom"... don't even get me started.  All of these are examples of the kind of bad data that will cause havoc in an automatic valuation model.  MRED (the Chicago area MLS) relies on agents self policing the data for accuracy, but that's like the fox guarding the hen house.

Valuation models are great (I build my own), but if the people using them don't understand how and why they work , and real estate agents don't, they won't work.

Comments

[Reggie from RPR]

Hi Evan,
I’m not sure how much you've heard about Realtors Property Resource™. But I believe you just made one of the many arguments why we need a system like RPR™. We all know that errors exist in the available data sets...even via MLS data. Our goal at RPR is to assemble all available data so REALTORS® can view a side by side comparison of what the public facts say and what the listing agent facts say, and of course even historic facts.

[Evan Kane]

Thanks for the comment Reggie. I did see a presentation of the RPR™ and my criticism is in regards to how accurate the RVM will be. Even if the RVM model is perfect it will still suffer from the poor data that goes into it. I did not see any way to correct the data points, only the subject property.