On his Zillow account, Jeremy Wacksman has “favorited” every home he’s ever lived in, just to keep tabs. Among them: a two-story, 2,500-square-foot house with four bedrooms, 2½ bathrooms and a sprawling front yard in the Cincinnati suburbs where he grew up. “The doors weren’t red when we lived there,” the chief executive officer of Zillow Group Inc. notes, squinting at a “street view” image on his iPhone. In 1997, when Wacksman was in college, his father sold the house for $227,000. These days his company’s proprietary algorithmic valuation, or Zestimate, calculates it’s worth around $700,000.
Zillow is to homebuying what ...
