How much would you pay for a manufactured home in a mobile home park? $90,000? What if it was in a nice area in Sunnyvale, Calif.? Maybe $129,000? That happens to be the listing price.
Zillow [stock Z][/stock], on the other hand, had it “Zestimated” at $357,000.
I was curious, so I called the listing agent, William Cotton at Advantage Homes, who was quite shocked at the listing price.
“I bet they mistook it for a conventional home,” he said. “This is a manufactured home in a mobile home park.”
That was my bet too. After all, this manufactured home does have 3 beds and 2 baths, and the $357,000 price tag would be quite reasonable if it were a conventional home in high-priced Sunnyvale. So, I contacted Zillow.
But they did, in fact, know it was in a mobile home park.
“We did know this was a mobile home. Turns out it’s in a really expensive neighborhood and there aren’t a lot of comps for mobile homes in this area to help inform the Zestimate,” said Jill Simmons of Zillow.
When I told her it was actually in a massive mobile home park, called El Dorado Mobile Home Park, and that there was actually a listing of all the homes in the park for sale, she said that because only two of them had sold in the last several months it simply wasn’t enough for the Zestimate.
While I understand that the Zestimate is calculated by a computer, this seems to point out exactly why many real estate agents have such a problem with it: It simply can’t account for obvious problems that are easily spotted by a trained human eye.
Or in this case, a completely untrained one. Because, let’s be honest, no manufactured home in a mobile home park is ever going to be worth $357,000.
How did I find this post, you ask? Well, I happened upon this blog, which commented on how bizarre it was the listing featured a potted tree in a bathtub. It is, in fact, odd, and probably another reason why the home shouldn’t be priced at $357,000.
But, I digress.
Seriously though, that’s a tree in a bathtub.
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