Zillow Real Estate & Rentals 4+

Horrible now with street view replacement

I previously liked this app but when I can no longer use the area view from above to see all sides of the house and the back yard, you made my job harder to find properties in another state. The street view is horrible, slow, and if the house property has an alley, you might see a little of the back, and sometimes you can't. What once took 20 secs now takes minutes to slowly navigate and many times I can't even see the side and back of a house. Please bring back the mapping view where I can use my iPhone to drill in, out and flip to the side views and back yard. This is how I narrowed down options plus it helped to zoom out to evaluate the neighborhood. The upgrade also lost some property lines on that view (iOS 10.3.3). This is also important to me. I want a list of 5 homes to look when I go to my hometown and you made that impossible. I will need to drive to them. People are losing opportunities and your value decrease A GREAT DEAL because of these changes. Please bring the satellite area view back rather than the clunky slow street one. Thank you.

Not a fan of the latest update; Zestimate algorithm feels Orwellian.

1. I feel like it’s now harder to see the HOA fees when you’re browsing, and those can make a huge difference in the affordability of the listing. Also, I feel like it’s harder to change the mortgage estimate (it used to be easy to zero out the insurance payment if you could see that was covered by HOA — it’s still easy to zero that out, but now I can’t figure out how to make it recalculate the monthly mortgage once I make changes). Also, the new app icon kind of looks like someone sat on the old logo/icon? Not sure if that’s what the effect they were going for...
2. Since Zillow relies on an algorithm to harvest listings from MLS sites, it’s not always as accurate as an actual MLS site (it often misses when properties are sold, for instance).
3. The Zestimate algorithm continues to puzzle me... it doesn’t seem to have much basis in reality, and when my house was on the market the Zestimate would fluctuate wildly, yet the sudden $30,000 drop in the Zestimate wouldn’t be reflected in graph of the recent Zestimates. It was like the 1984 version of the real estate appraisal...
4. BUT, I use Zillow to browse anyway because it’s free and it’s a relatively intuitive app — if I see something I like, I ask my real estate agent about it, and they send me the official MLS listing with the more accurate details.

Still Needs Improvement

Zillow does not worry about facts and their information can be very inaccurate. I was advised by my realtor to avoid using Zillow because of inaccurate information. The Zillow website is very user friendly, but just beware it can be misleading. After I bought my new home I “claimed it” on the Zillow website. They are showing I purchased the home for much less than I did, but they will not correct this information. I called the tax office just to be sure nothing bogus was going on. It turns out my info and the tax office is the same. So long story short, Zillow is not concerned with showing us inaccurate information.

Update: After several email exchanges, scanning and submitting documents proving I was providing factual information, Zillow corrected the information I was disputing. The person who helped me seemed polite and helpful. So I changed my review from a 1 star to 3 stars. The reason for 3 stars is I still have several problems with what happened. First off, I still do not know why false information was provided. Second, I do not know why it was so hard to have the information corrected. Third, and this is my biggest problem...I have asked Zillow repeatedly where did they get their incorrect information, and Zillow has never responded to my question.

Developer Response , 06/11/2018

Our team would like to investigate right away. If you email appstorehelp@zillow.com we’ll reach out directly.