What 32 Years in Real Estate Taught Meredith Martin About Value, Risk, and Why She Doesn't Trust the Zestimate

I recently sat down with Meredith Martin, a real estate agent who has spent 32 years working both the San Francisco Bay Area and the Reno-Tahoe market. She never planned on a career in real estate. But she got her start in 1994 with a company called Lofts Unlimited, selling live-work warehouses in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood during the dot-com boom, and she never left the business.

That early experience shaped how she still operates today. She was working with young, highly educated founders and tech buyers, many of whom didn't trust real estate agents and assumed they were overpaid. Her response to that skepticism has stayed the same for three decades: if she can't show her value, she shouldn't get paid. She told me she doesn't work with clients who don't see that value anymore, because she doesn't have to. Her business runs almost entirely on referrals from people who have already experienced what she brings to a transaction.

A Story That Shows Why De-Risking Matters

One of the more striking parts of our conversation was a story about a San Francisco condo she listed for a client. The building carried HOA dues of $4,000 a month, and the area had fallen out of favor hard during COVID. The client had purchased the unit for $1.6 million years earlier. They listed at $1.85 million, received an early all-cash offer of $1.6 million, and countered. The property ultimately sold for $1.25 million.

That is a $350,000 difference between the early offer and the final sale price. Meredith was direct about the lesson in that story: real estate does not always go up. Her job, as she describes it, is less about feeding clients listings they can already find on Zillow themselves and more about helping them see what they can't see on their own. That might mean pointing out a power line that threatens a view, a foundation issue, or an HOA structure that is about to become a serious financial liability. Some things are cosmetic. Some things are not. Knowing the difference is where an agent earns their fee.

Why She Doesn't Trust the Zestimate

Meredith told me one of her favorite pastimes is picking apart automated valuation tools like Zillow's Zestimate and Redfin's estimate. Both are proprietary algorithms, and she has spent years testing their accuracy against real transactions.

She shared an example that stuck with me. Before listing a condo, she checked the off-market Zestimate, which sat at just over $800,000. She listed the property at $965,000. Thirty minutes later, the Zestimate had jumped to over a million dollars, an increase of roughly $143,000 in half an hour, based purely on the new listing price. The property ultimately sold for around $950,000. Both the off-market and on-market estimates were significantly off.

Zillow's own published error rate is around 7.1 percent for off-market estimates and 1.3 percent for on-market estimates, and Meredith pointed out the obvious reason for that gap: the on-market number is more accurate because a real estate agent actually walked through the property and priced it. She had similar concerns about appraisals, noting that she has seen swings of $100,000 to $500,000 between appraisers on the same property. Her take is simple. Market value is ultimately what a willing buyer and a willing seller agree to, not what an algorithm predicts.

Why She Is Bullish on Reno

We closed the conversation talking about where Reno sits in its growth cycle. Reno is still early in its investment and growth phase, with a strong feeder university in UNR, an international airport, and a strong economy. Buying in Reno now is unlikely to be a mistake over the next decade, and she has backed that view with her own money as a property owner here herself.

She also pointed to something specific to Washoe County that often surprises buyers coming from California. Property taxes here are not reassessed based on purchase price the way they are in California. Older properties can carry remarkably low tax bills, and combined with Nevada's lack of a state income tax, it adds up to a meaningfully different cost of ownership over time.

If you are thinking about buying or selling in the Reno-Tahoe area, or just want a more honest, experienced perspective on how real estate valuations actually work, Meredith's insight is worth your time.

If you want to work with Meredith, reach out to her one of these ways:

Website: https://meredithmartin.com/

Phone: (415) 877-1029

Email: meredith.martin@compass.com