Zillow® on Thursday announced the top three teams from Round One of its Zillow Prize® competition who collectively will take home $50,000. Zillow first announced Zillow Prize in May 2017, and more than 3,800 teams representing 91 countries participated. Now, the top 100 teams have moved on to the Second Round, where they are competing for the million-dollar grand prize.
To qualify for the Second Round, teams had to improve the accuracy of the Zestimate® beyond the current error rate of 4.2% in the three competition counties. The top team was able to increase accuracy by 4.4%, achieving an overall rate of approximately 4 percent%.
This Zillow Zestimate came in below the asking price, but the home has yet to be built.
The top three teams include a team representing three different countries who have never met in-person and a father-daughter duo from Switzerland.
- FIRST PLACE: Team Zensemble was awarded the $25,000 first prize. The team is Russ Wolfinger (United States), Dmytro Poplavskiy (Australia), and Jonathan Gradstein (Israel), who first met online as competitors in another contest. Wolfinger plans to donate all his winnings from the first round to the math and science program at Meredith College, a women’s liberal arts school in North Carolina, where his wife is the dean of Natural and Mathematical Sciences.
“My family has three daughters, and we’re really passionate about getting women involved in these hard-core STEM projects,” Wolfinger said.
For Poplavisky, his hard work on Zillow Prize also had an impact on his electric bill, as it doubled during the first round due to his uptick in server usage. To offset the cost, he installed solar panels on his Brisbane, Australia-based home.
- SECOND PLACE: Team Silogram-2 won the $15,000 second prize. This father-daughter duo worked on the competition from their home in Zurich, Switzerland. Phil Margolis, an independent consultant focusing on machine learning contract jobs, and his 21-year-old daughter Isabel Margolis, a student studying math and computer science in Zurich, became interested in the competition because it was a real-life scenario they could identify with. While they don’t live together, they had the added benefit of being able to work together in-person from the Margolis family home.
“I’ve bought and sold a home in the U.S., and you look at properties and there’s all these theories about how to valuate them,” Phil Margolis said. “This was really an interesting case where we could apply really advanced machine learning technology to real world data.” The pair has not decided what they will do if they win the million-dollar prize. “I’ll probably end up spending it on cloud server time,” Phil Margolis joked.
“I was excited to participate and team up with my dad on this contest,” Isabel Margolis said. “I’m often outnumbered by men in my computer science classes, the ratio is about 20% female so it is very extreme. I wish more women would go into computer science.”
- THIRD PLACE: Ryuji “Jack” Sakata was awarded the $10,000 third prize. A resident of Osaka, Japan, Sakata is one of many solo competitors in the contest. The 30-year-old data scientist has spent the past six years at Panasonic working to improve manufacturing using data analysis. He dabbled with programming in college but only ended up in his current role after he was randomly assigned to data science at the electronics company. He learned on the fly and has transferred those skills over to Zillow Prize, even though he’s never visited the U.S.
“I am not familiar with the U.S. housing market, but a challenge of creating a real forecast for the future was very interesting,” he said. Sakata says he hasn’t decided what he would do if he wins the million-dollar prize but imagines he might put it toward the purchase of a house in his hometown of Osaka.
Read more about the finalists competing for the Zillow Prize at www.zillow.com/promo/zillow-prize-first-round/.
