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Zillow is using artificial intelligence to judge the quality of your countertops

Zillow has Zestimates on about 1.6 million homes for sale across the country.
Credit: Thinkstock by Getty

Zillow is using artificial intelligence to boost the accuracy of its home-valuation software, and it says the latest version can even judge the quality of your kitchen countertops.

The Seattle-based real estate technology company says the upgrades make its proprietary algorithm better than ever at guessing what a home will fetch.

Zillow has Zestimates on about 1.6 million homes for sale across the country. Across all those listings, it gets within 5 percent of the sales price nearly 84 percent of the time and within 10 percent better than 95 percent of the time.

Zillow says its Zestimate relies on a variety of data, including county tax records and information from listing services and brokerages. It also allows homeowners to submit details about their homes.

Now the software has been upgraded with new image-recognition technology that can pore over the photos included in for-sale listings and identify key features — like kitchen countertops, fireplaces and bathroom fixtures — that may play into the sale price. In a statement, the Zestimate’s creator, Zillow Chief Analytics Officer Stan Humphries said the software’s artificial neural networks were trained to recognize features by examining millions of home photos.

Read more at the Denver Business Journal

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