“They thought they needed to build a machine learning model when they really needed to build an entirely new organization , one that possessed the technical and cultural mindset necessary to succeed in this space.”
Zillow wrote off more than $500 million and shut down home flipping. The pitch was an algorithm fed by Zillow’s data that could price houses with pinpoint accuracy. Underwriting shops expect early losses and learn from them. Zillow treated it as a data science project and folded the moment the model was wrong.