Most people don't know what their home is worth, and if you get two appraisers or realtors to give you an estimate they'll likely be quite different.

Similarly, if you think a house is worth $500k but you list it for $600k, you don't know if someone will decide they love that house and they're willing to pay that amount or not.

That's one reason Opendoor tends to list houses at a fair premium to what they paid, as sometimes someone decides it is worth it and they make 20%+ on homes like that.

Yeah, and by the same token, you don't know if the buyer offering the top amount is really going to pull through, giving an offer from OpenDoor a certain appeal.

Zillow just has Zillow. The homeowner has Zillow, local realtors, inspections, personal experience of the house...

The local Realtors are ultimately just going off sales data, and inspections rarely happen before an agreement is made in principle to buy.

> inspections rarely happen before an agreement is made in principle to buy

That depends on the market.

Where is that done? I've bought in two states and sold in one and typically the way it's done is you have a contingency in the home sale that lets you walk if you don't like what your inspector finds. A seller could theoretically do their own but there's little upside, since this just creates a record of any issue that turns up that you now can't claim ignorance of.

In Oakland at the moment the sellers typically get the inspection done, provide the report in the disclosure packet, and then expect an offer with inspection contingency waived.

On the downside, there are the obvious risks in the structure of the incentives - in principle these may be sufficiently mitigated by the need to maintain a good reputation among buyers' agents; in practice they may not be.

On the upside, having had the opportunity (and motivation) to read many tens of such reports meant that I was (I believe) much better at reading them - and had a sense of what was typical amongst the homes I was looking at - by the time I read through the report for the house I wound up buying, and there haven't been any surprises so far...