SEATTLE, May 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.
To homeowners, sellers and buyers, the Zestimate home valuation
remains an important data point. Combined with other information,
like recent home sales, and the guidance of real estate
professionals, the Zestimate helps consumers make smarter financial
decisions about their homes.
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 U.S.
median absolute percent error currently stands at 5 percent,
improved from 14 percent in 2006.
"We still spend enormous resources on improving the Zestimate,
and are proud that with advancements in machine learning and cloud
computing, we've brought the error rate down to 5 percent
nationwide," said Stan Humphries,
creator of the Zestimate home valuation and Zillow Group chief
analytics officer. "While that error rate is incredibly low, we
know the next round of innovation will come from imaginative
solutions involving everything from deep learning to hyperlocal
data sets -- the type of work perfect for crowdsourcing within a
competitive environment."
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,
2018i and a private final round that kicks off
Feb. 1, 2018 and ends Jan. 15, 2019ii.
Contest participants have until Oct. 16,
2017 to register for the qualifying round, download and
explore the competition data setiii, and develop a model
to improve the Zestimate residual error. The top 100 teams from the
qualifying round, those whose solutions most reduce the difference
between the Zestimate home valuation and the actual sale price of
the homes within the dataset, will be invited to participate in the
final round and compete for the $1 million
dollar prize.
In the final round, the winning team must build an algorithm to
predict the actual sale price itself, using innovative data sources
to engineer new features that will give the model an edge over
other competitors. The home value predictions from each algorithm
submission will be evaluated against real-time home sales in August
through October 2018. To take home the $1 million dollar grand prize, the winning
algorithm must beat Zillow's benchmark accuracy on the final round
competition data setiv and enhance the accuracy further
than any other competitor. A $100,000
second place prize and $50,000 third
place prize will also be awarded in the final round. A total of
$50,000 will also be awarded to the
top three ranking teams in the qualifying round.
Zillow publishes Zestimates on more than 110 million homes
across the country based on 7.5 million statistical and machine
learning models that examine hundreds of data points on each
individual home.
To calculate the Zestimate home valuation, Zillow uses data from
county and tax assessor records, and direct feeds from hundreds of
multiple listing services and brokerages. Additionally, homeowners
have the ability to update facts about their homes and see an
immediate change to their Zestimate. More than 70 million homes on
Zillow have been updated by the community of users.
More details on registering and competing for the Zillow Prize
are available at www.zillow.com/zprize
Zillow
Zillow® is the leading real estate and rental marketplace
dedicated to empowering consumers with data, inspiration and
knowledge around the place they call home, and connecting them with
the best local professionals who can help. Zillow serves the full
lifecycle of owning and living in a home: buying, selling, renting,
financing, remodeling and more. In addition to Zillow.com®, Zillow
operates the most popular suite of mobile real estate apps, with
more than two dozen apps across all major platforms. Launched in
2006, Zillow is owned and operated by Zillow Group (NASDAQ:Z and
ZG) and headquartered in Seattle.
Zillow, Zestimate and Zillow.com are registered trademarks of
Zillow, Inc.
i Detailed qualifying round timeline is as follows:
All submissions are due on October 16,
2017. There will be a three-month evaluation period, which
begins on October 17, 2017, when
submissions will be evaluated against the actual sale prices of the
homes. The final leaderboard will be revealed on January 17, 2018.
ii Detailed final round timeline is as follows: All
contests submissions are due on June 29,
2018. Because real estate transaction data is public
information, there will be a one-month gap followed by a
three-month evaluation period, which begins on August 1, 2018, when submissions will be
evaluated against the actual sale prices of the homes. The final
leaderboard and final prize winners will be revealed on or about
January 15, 2019.
iii Qualifying round data set will encompass a list of
real estate properties in Los
Angeles, Orange and
Ventura, CA counties.
iv Final round participants are challenged to beat the
Zillow benchmark model, a modified version of the Zestimate
algorithm that will be trained using the exact same data set
available to everyone in the final round. This benchmark model has
been created for the purposed of this competition and is different
than the standard Zestimate displayed on the website.
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SOURCE Zillow