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Zillow Talk  By  cover art

Zillow Talk

By: Spencer Rascoff,Stan Humphries
Narrated by: Spencer Rascoff,Stan Humphries
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Publisher's summary

THIS AUDIOBOOK EDITION WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS ZILLOW TALK: THE NEW RULES OF REAL ESTATE. THE NEW TITLE IS ZILLOW TALK: REWRITING THE RULES OF REAL ESTATE.

How do you spot an area poised for gentrification? Is spring or winter the best time to put your house on the market? Will a house on Swamp Road sell for less than one on Gingerbread Lane? The fact is that the rules of real estate have changed drastically over the past five years. To understand real estate in our fast-paced, technology-driven world, we need to toss out all of the outdated truisms and embrace today's brand new information. But how?

Enter Zillow, the nation's #1 real estate website and mobile app. Thanks to its treasure trove of proprietary data and army of statisticians and data scientists, led by chief economist Stan Humphries, Zillow has been able to spot the trends and truths of today's housing market while acknowledging that a home is more than an economic asset. In ZILLOW TALK, Humphries and CEO Spencer Rascoff explain the science behind where and how we live now and reveal practical, data-driven insights about buying, selling, renting and financing real estate. Listen to this book to find out why:

  • It's better to remodel your bathroom than your kitchen
  • Putting the word "cute" in your listing could cost you thousands of dollars
  • You shouldn't buy the worst house in the best neighborhood
  • You should never list your house for $444,000
  • You shouldn't list your house for sale before March Madness or after the Masters

Densely packed with entertaining anecdotes and invaluable how-to advice, ZILLOW TALK is poised to be the real estate almanac for the next generation.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2014 Spencer Rascoff and Stan Humphries (P)2014 Hachette Audio

What listeners say about Zillow Talk

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Not very informative for real estate professionals

I felt the whole book could have been summed up in a couple pages. Turing one fact into an entire chapter over and over again was tiring. It's not a bad listen for new home buyers but it's not worth while for real estate professionals.

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18 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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  • JC
  • 02-07-15

Meh

The authors of this book are the founders of zillow.com and spend the first chapters continually reminding you how smart they are and how much their website has changed the face of real estate in the U.S. I found my self saying things like, "Okay, we get it!"

The narration is done by the authors. Out of 250 Audible titles I've noticed that whenever an author or authors reads their own book, it is never as good as other books that hired professional narrators. This is no exception. The narration both narrators is halting. One of the narrators is particularly annoying because he speaks in 3 and 4 word bursts. Next time put the ego away and hire a pro.

Lastly, the authors write in such a way that you can tell they think they are being clever. In most cases it doesn't work. Example, instead of just calling the southwestern part of the country the southwest, they repeatedly call it the "wild west." It gets old after the third time, let alone the fifteenth. Another example is the use of the made up word, Gayghborhoods, to talk about how gays living in an area affect surrounding home values. Com'on guys, just give us the facts. Stop trying to be clever. Save it for bedtime stories for the children.

There were a few eye opening stats, such as, only 2 out of every 15 home owners deduct the interest on the mortgage of their home at tax time. Other than a few obscure facts though, the book doesn't offer much beyond obvious statements such as low income neighborhoods don't appreciate as fast as upper class ones. Well no kidding...

The book is just not worth a credit.


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17 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Confused logic!

The authors regularly confuse correlation with causation, overestimate irrelevant indicators, provide what looks to me as contradictory data and loose the thread all together.
I couldn't force myself to finish the book (or should I call it the Zillow infomercial) but from the big chunk I endured I can say it is one of the worst in the genre.
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16 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars

Unhelpful

Not a good book. Just dumb. Written in the style of Freakonomics. Taking each chapter to expound on a subject totally unrelated to other chapters in the book. From the words to use in describing your listing to explaining how New York real estate is different to shaming waterfront property buyers because they keep buying waterfront homes even though the seas are rising. The authors feel pretty good about their web traffic, and they draw conclusions from clicks and call it research. The authors pounded on George Bush as the cause of the Financial Meltdown, compared him to Barack Obama for their errors in handling the economy, took several opportunities to point out how wrong Conservatives were, all the while pretending to be non partisan. They even took a chapter to make their case for the elimination of the Mortgage Interest Deduction suggesting that middle class Americans gain no benefit from it. They called it a government expenditure. How can it be an expenditure if the government never collected the money in the first place to spend it? They concluded the book by patting themselves on the back for starting the last chapter with a quote by Donald Rumsfeld. Arrogant, directionless and unhelpful.

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7 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Basically a long sales pitch to use zillow

Roughly 15% of the info in this book is new or valuable information about real estate, the rest is a drawn out marketing pitch for how cool Zillow and its algorithm's are and why you should use the site.

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A Real Estate 'Freakanomics'

Really enjoyed it, and as I'd hoped for. Multiple narrators kept it lively. While not a commercial for Zillow it did point out several tools they have I didn't know about.

Companion PDF to the audio book mentioned several times, will be audio useful since these findings are data driven. ...Though I haven't figured out how to access that yet through mobile. Maybe I'll have to use one of these "computer" things.

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

If you are in Real Estate & or Mortgage read it

Yes, amazing the numbers and reality of things that we dont know but is part of our lives, listening to this book can save you thousands of $$$$$!

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4 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Enjoyable read, but questionable econ/stats assump

I really enjoyed their book. However, I am cautious when there is a lack of precise detail explaining casual relationships and the embedded assumptions in each models. One example, would be the case with Starbucks locations causing above average home price appreciation would be far more complicated controlling for than they illuded. Overall, I would recommend the book to a home buyer/seller or a virgin real estate investor. I would not dare recommend it to any economist or statistician.

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3 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Not as good as I hoped

It was ok but I expected more given all the data they have relative to incomes etc. they can do better

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3 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

There are better books on this topic.

It is a book full of statistics most of which didn't apply to my wife and I and our pursuit in purchasing a home.

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2 people found this helpful