Stories of people getting cash offers for their homes tens of thousands of dollars over asking price have become normal. This year, inventory in the US housing market hit a record low while home prices hit a record high. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman recently highlighted the craziness with a tweet recounting the story of a home buyer who offered to name their first-born child after the seller--and was turned down. As the hot US housing market began to overheat, in February Zillow began making initial cash offers to buy homes based on its price estimate. Now Zillow has updated its algorithm behind those estimates in a way the company says will make them more accurate--and allow Zillow to offer to buy more homes.

A new competition is posted on Kaggle, and the prize is $1.2 Million. Here we provide some help about solving this new problem: improving home value estimates, sponsored by Zillow. We have published in the past about home value forecasting, see here, and also .here and here. In this article, I provide specific advice related to this new competition, to anyone interested in competing or curious about home value forecasting. Additional advice can be obtained by contacting me. More specifically, I provide here high-level advice, rather than about selecting specific statistical models or algorithms, though I also discuss algorithm selection in the last section.

A new competition is posted on Kaggle, and the prize is $1.2 Million. Here we provide some help about solving this new problem: improving home value estimates, sponsored by Zillow. We have published in the past about home value forecasting, see here, and also .here and here. In this article, I provide specific advice related to this new competition, to anyone interested in competing or curious about home value forecasting. Additional advice can be obtained by contacting me. More specifically, I provide here high-level advice, rather than about selecting specific statistical models or algorithms, though I also discuss algorithm selection in the last section.