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Zillow Launches $1 Million Zestimate Competition for Data Scientists

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by Angela Guess

A recent press release reports, “Zillow, the leading real estate information and home-related marketplace, today has launched Zillow® Prize, an award of $1 million to the first person or team who can most improve the Zestimate® algorithm, Zillow’s proprietary home valuation tool. Zillow Prize calls for data scientists, engineers and visionaries to compete to improve automated home valuations of 110 million homes across the U.S. Designed to be a starting point to help people estimate the value of a home when it launched in 2006, the Zestimate home valuation marked the first time homeowners had instant access to information about their homes’ estimated values, for free. Prior to the Zestimate, only appraisers, mortgages lenders and professional real estate agents had access to computer valuations of homes – never homeowners or prospective buyers.”

The release goes on, “To data scientists, the Zestimate home valuation is known as the ultimate algorithm, one of the highest-profile, most accurate and sophisticated examples of machine learning. Zillow Prize will mark the first time that a portion of the proprietary data that powers the Zestimate home valuation will be available to individuals outside of Zillow. Zillow’s data science team continually works to improve the accuracy of the Zestimate home valuation, as measured by how close the Zestimate is to the eventual sale price of a home… The contest is being administered by Kaggle, a platform designed to connect data scientists with complex machine learning problems. It will be staggered into two rounds, the public qualifying round which opens today and concludes Jan. 17, 2018 and a private final round that kicks off Feb. 1, 2018 and ends Jan. 15, 2019.”

Read more at PR Newswire.

Photo credit: Zillow

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