I spent almost six years leading various sales teams at Zillow. I loved it. It was a great company to work for with really talented people. I learned a ton.
One of the greatest tools in real estate is the Zestimate. The Zestimate is a perceived value of your home. It’s essentially an AI-derived value assigned to your home based on market conditions and thousands of data points. If you own a home, you frequent the Zestimate page for your house because it’s essentially the equivalent of the stock price of your house.
Now, if you’re a consumer, you love the Zestimate, and if you’re a real estate agent, you hate the Zestimate. Agents will tell you the Zestimate is inaccurate and not a good representation of a home’s price, whereas consumers will tell you it’s real and the right number because Zillow published it.
The answer is somewhere in the middle, but the reality is that the price of your home is always changing. The market changes, the prices in the area change, the interest rates change, and the value is constantly going up and down by as much as a point or two on each side.
With the Zestimate, your house is always being appraised, just like your value; you’re always being appraised.
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Sure, you may not have a Zestimate that follows you around, but there is some sort of career appraisal value that follows you based on your network, your skills, your brand, and the market in which you operate.
The difference is that your career Zestimate isn’t updated by an algorithm. It’s updated every time someone thinks about your name. A recruiter remembers the way you handled a conversation six months ago. A former manager gets asked if they know anyone for a role. A client decides whether they’d work with you again.
“Every interaction either nudges your value higher or lower, even if you never see the number.”
The exciting part is that you have far more control over your career Zestimate than you think. Every new skill you develop increases it. Every relationship you build increases it. Every presentation you volunteer to give, every problem you solve, every article you write, every difficult conversation you handle well, every promise you keep, every person you help, all add another data point to your value.
This is why investing in yourself always pays dividends.
Read the book. Take the course. Ask for the bigger project. Build your personal brand. Reach out to someone you admire. Learn how AI can make you more effective.
None of those things will double your career value overnight, but collectively they move your number in the right direction year after year.
Markets will always fluctuate. Certain industries will get hot while others cool off. Companies will hire aggressively, then suddenly announce layoffs. Those things matter, but they don’t define your long-term value. The people who continue building skills, strengthening relationships, and expanding their reputation usually come out more valuable regardless of what the market is doing.
The mistake is assuming your career value only changes when you get promoted or switch jobs. Your career Zestimate is changing every single day.
Every meeting, every interaction, every decision, every piece of work you produce either raises or lowers your perceived value. The market is constantly appraising you whether you realize it or not.
Treat your career the same way you would any investment you wanted to grow over the next twenty years. Keep making deposits. Keep increasing your value. Keep giving people more reasons to bet on you. Do that consistently enough, and when the next opportunity comes along, you’ll discover your career Zestimate has been climbing long before anyone ever made you an offer.