Boosting your zestimate--1419 Cottage Street, Alameda, CA

Zillow's claim to fame is their "Zestimate" (tm), an automated valuation of your home based on comps and various other data points. If you claim your home and enter certain facts about it (e.g. fill out size and number of bathrooms that might be missing from the county records), you can obtain a revised "Zestimate" that gets displayed as the "owner's estimate" next to the official one.

One presumes this is used by sellers tryinto justify their asking price when the plain old Zestimate is too low for their taste (or the amount they owe), and sure enough this pretty Victorian (MLS #40346792) that just came on the market has a big fat custom owner's estimate:

Great central alameda home with extensive renovations almost complete. 3 bedrooms, 1 bath upstairs along with formal dining room, eat-in kitchen and living room. Build-out of lower level underway with 6 more rooms, including bath and laundry room. New foundation. Open sunday

Note the "extensive renovations [are] almost complete," which might be code for "gosh, we ran out of HELOC money, let's get outta here."

This house is listed at $739,000, right around the current Zestimate, but quite a bit less than the owner's estimate. What a deal!