Re-Valuing Homes: Countering the Culture of Real Estate on Zillow

• In Event: Regenerating Algorithms

Abstract

Today, the “interface economy” (Finn 2017) stands ready to serve by making data from a variety of sources not only available but actionable. For example, Zillow, the online real estate marketplace, pulls data from county records, realtors, and even homeowners to power their “Zestimates,” algorithmic home value estimates, recalibrated every day for more than one-hundred million properties. Their guesses are not very reliable. Such predictions are tantalizing, however, because they do not seem to cost anything. Yet harnessing the predictive power of big data can have unseen costs. Users of Zillow are being conditioned to believe in the myth of big data: given enough data, you can anticipate and control the consequences of your own actions in complex social conditions (boyd and Crawford 2012). Zestimates only contribute to a desire for more data and an anxiety that there will never be enough. These dynamics do not just affect users. They are shaping a new “culture of real estate” (Hanan 2010) that can amplify market fluctuations, with devastating effects on low-income homeowners and renters, even if they are not users of the site. How might housing data be processed and presented otherwise? Rather than providing simplistic predictions, can interfaces to data support difficult conversations, for example by challenging the rampant culture of real estate? This paper does not propose an alternative to the Zestimate, but an antidote: an interface which teaches that data should never appear to speak for themselves.

References:

boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (June 1, 2012): 662–79.

Finn, Ed. What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.

Hanan, Joshua S. “Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 176–201.

Author

• Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Georgia Institute of Technology