namanarora42 / zillow-beyond-zestimate

🏨 I was amazed with Zillow's success (failure?) so I dived deep.

Zillow-Beyond-Zestimate

Zillow's zestimate has been under a lot of scrutiny lately due to an increase in inaccurate estimation leading to losses for the company.

This analysis takes a different approach, where we try to predict the log error in the zestimate prediction. Thus, instead of revisiting the actual model for Zestimate calculation (which is a black box to us), we try to analyze what parameters actually cause the Zestimate to be off.

The data is provisioned by Zillow through a Kaggle competition.

Findings

Upon analyzing the feature importance for the best chosen model, the following features seem to be the most impactful in contributing to the error in Zestimates:

• Property/County Land Use Code
• Presence in Zip Code 964XXX (Properties in this area are generally incorrectly priced)
• Bedroom count (Properties with lower bedroom counts tend to have a higher error in the Zestimate)
• Garage Count
• Buildings that are rated at a Quality level of 5