February 06, 2016

Talking Zillow With Spencer Rascoff | #TomFerryShow Episode 4

9 minutes

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SR: I wrote this book called "Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate" with Zillow's chief economist, Dan Humphries. What it's all about is mining all this incredible data that we have at Zillow and making it accessible and actionable to consumers.

One of the things that we do in the book is try to debunk a lot of myths. For example remodeling. A very common myth is that you should remodel your kitchen. The data actually says if you want to earn a return, when you sell your home you actually want to remodel a bathroom. In particular, remodel your bathroom at the very low end, because if you do a high-end remodel you just won't get money out the other end. We used a lot of data and a lot of analysis to prove that. It really debunks central myths of the real estate industry.

Another good one is "always buy the worst house on the best street" or "the worst house in the best neighborhood." Everyone has heard that. It's actually terrible advice. We mined the data and looked at the bottom 10% of homes around the entire country. Then looked in each neighborhood, by value, and analyzed that appreciation rate versus the average. It turns out that the worst home in those neighborhoods performs significantly worse than the mid-level or high-end. It kind of makes intuitive sense if you think about it because there just aren't that many buyers for that type of home in that neighborhood. Sometimes it's the worst home for a reason. We try to challenge these central assumptions and replace fiction with fact. That's what the book is all about.

Now I want to make an offer to everyone watching, if you buy a copy of Zillow Talk on http://amazon.com, send me a copy of the receipt to [email protected] and I'll send you a PDF copy of our CEO manual. It sells for $300 and is all about utilizing proven systems to organize your business and take it to the next level.

We're out. Thanks so much for watching. Remember, always, strategy matters now more than ever and your passion rules!