While my mountain man is off communing with nature, I am reviewing Zillow’s quarterly statistics for San Diego County. What’s wrong with this picture?
Zillow’s quarterly statistics, or Zindexes, are out, and you can see the score card for San Diego County here. The Zindex is a measure of the median Zestimate for a given area. Now, I am still grappling with the logic. If we agree that Zestimates are generally (and often grossly) inaccurate, would the median of the same give a more meaningful, global picture of market trends? At first blush and after an exhaustive study of their figures (Daughter #2 two and I just finished yet another satisfying dinner of local take-out fare, and the dog looks like he can “hold it” for a minute or two more), the answer appears to be “maybe”.
As is often the case here, let’s take Scripps Ranch. Our Zindex is $666,595, which includes all homes, attached and detached. That feels about right. Our quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year changes are shown as -1.3% and -3.0% respectively. Again, this is sort of right, but by my experience, a little on the low side.
At least, Scripps Ranch is fairing better in the popularity contest (most frequently searched on Zillow). We ranked number 10, behind the likes of La Jolla (can’t afford to live there), Rancho Santa Fe (can’t afford to even visit there), and 92121 (think UCSD). Of course, the other coastal communities of Carmel Valley and Del Mar cooked our goose. Joining us in the inland “in crowd” were Rancho Penasquitos, 4S Ranch and Poway.
One new feature which I like is the breakdown by size of home (small, medium and large). Although these categories are not strictly defined, Zillow is showing that higher priced homes in San Diego County have been less affected by the market correction. This correlates with the old adage that the little guys (condos) are the first to fall. So go the condos goes the market, and certainly the recent subprime mess has had a little something to do with this trend. And then there is the obvious – Gazillion dollar home buyers are less affected by silly things like loans and overall affordability than the rest of us.
Not to mention, gazillion dollar home buyers probably have dog walkers on staff. Which reminds me…
(Editors note: If you think I am going soft on Zillow because they bought me, you are wrong. I am still without a complete set of beer glasses, those cheap-skates).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kris Berg is Co-Owner and Designated Broker of San Diego Castles Realty. If not-so static web sites are your thing, go here at once where you will find loads of real estate information including homes for sale, market trends, floor plans and more. Kris's hobbies include fencing and spot welding. She likes kittens. 
on 
on 
on 
on 
on 
on 
on 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Cheap-skate here. Thanks for this objective review, Kris.
It’s good to hear that the San Diego Zindex jives with your personal experience. Using the median Zestimate to report trends allows us to exclude the impact of individual Zestimates which may be inaccurate. The simple reason this works so well is that inaccurate Zestimates have an equal chance of being high as they do of being low – so by using the one “in the middle” we can effectively ignore the inaccurate estimates that fall evenly on either side of that median.
FYI – we publish these reports quarterly but you can also access the historical Zindex “live” for any Zip, County, City and State in the “Charts and Data” section of any homes details on Zillow.
Kris-
I can now officially say we are no longer cheap skates — your package of glasses went out yesterday!
News today from the office – A package FOR ME! Could it be???!!!