What is your property actually worth?

What actually drives your home's value

Value is not one thing. It is a stack of factors, and they do not carry equal weight. Roughly in order of impact:

• Location and lot Where the property sits, the size and usability of the lot, frontage, orientation, grade, access, and what physically adjoins it. This is the factor you cannot renovate.
• Recent comparable sales What genuinely similar properties nearby have closed for in the recent past. This is the anchor for everything else, and it is the number appraisers work from too.
• Size and layout Square footage, bedroom and bathroom count, single-level versus multi-level, and whether the floor plan is functional or awkward.
• Condition and updates Kitchens and bathrooms carry disproportionate weight, followed by flooring, paint, and windows. Deferred maintenance discounts a home more than most owners expect.
• Age and major systems Roof, HVAC, water heater, electrical, plumbing, and foundation. Buyers price the replacements they can see coming.
• Supply and demand right now How much comparable inventory is competing with you, and how many buyers are active. The same house is worth different money in different months.
• The cost of money Mortgage rates change what a buyer can pay for the same monthly payment. This moves prices across an entire market at once.
• Carrying costs attached to the property HOA dues, special assessments, and the local property-tax burden all affect what a buyer can afford to offer.

Why the online estimate is not your value

An automated valuation model — the instant estimate you get from a portal — is a statistical model run against public records and, where available, MLS data. It is a genuinely useful starting point and a genuinely bad place to stop. Here is why.

It has never been inside your house

An AVM cannot see that you renovated the kitchen, or that the previous owner's addition was never permitted, or that the roof is at the end of its life. Two homes with identical public records can be $80,000 apart in real value. The model cannot know which one is yours.

Its inputs are often wrong

AVMs feed on public records, and public records are frequently stale or simply incorrect — wrong square footage, wrong bedroom count, an unrecorded addition, a lot-line adjustment that never propagated. Garbage in, confident-looking number out.

It needs comparable sales, and sometimes there are none

The models perform best on tract housing where dozens of near-identical homes trade every year. They perform worst on exactly the properties people care most about: custom homes, unusual lots, acreage, waterfront, historic properties, and rural areas where the nearest true comparable sold two years ago and three miles away.

In some states, it cannot even see the sale price

The portals themselves publish accuracy metrics, and they are honest about the error rate. Read them. A median error of a few percent sounds small until you apply it to a home worth several hundred thousand dollars — and a median error means half of all homes are off by more than that.

What a real comparative market analysis does

A CMA is what a working agent produces, and it is not a model. It is an argument, built from evidence, about what your specific property will sell for.

1. Select true comparables. Recently closed sales that are genuinely similar in location, size, age, condition, and type. Not "nearby and roughly the same" — actually comparable.
2. Adjust for the differences. Your home has an extra bathroom; the comp has a bigger lot; yours has a new roof and theirs does not. Each difference gets a dollar adjustment, and the adjustments are defensible.
3. Read the current competition. What is actively listed against you right now, and what has recently gone pending, tells us where the market is heading — closed sales tell us where it has been.
4. Account for condition and presentation. Which requires actually walking through the property, which is why I do.
5. Produce a range and a strategy. Not a single number pretending to be precise, but a defensible range, plus a recommendation on where to position within it and why.

The output is something you can act on: a price, the evidence behind it, and a written net sheet so you know what you would actually walk away with.

CMA, appraisal, or automated estimate — which do you need?

If your purpose is a lawsuit, an estate, a divorce settlement, a tax appeal, or anything a court or an agency will review, ask a professional whether a formal appraisal is required — the rules differ by state and by use. If your purpose is "should I sell, and for how much," a proper CMA from someone who has stood in your kitchen is the right instrument.

Three expensive myths

"My assessed value is my market value."

It is not, and the gap can be enormous in either direction. Assessment is a tax function, not a market function. How often a property is reassessed, what triggers a reassessment, what ratio of market value the assessment is supposed to represent, and how appeals work are all set by state and local law and vary dramatically across the country. Never price a home off its assessment.

"I spent $60,000 on the remodel, so the house is worth $60,000 more."

Improvements return a fraction of their cost, and the fraction depends heavily on what you did, how well it was done, and whether it fits the market you are in. Kitchens, bathrooms, and curb appeal generally return the most. Highly personal or over-improved features frequently return the least — and can actively narrow your buyer pool. If you are renovating with a sale in mind, ask before you spend, not after.

"My neighbor listed at $700,000, so mine is worth $700,000."

Your neighbor's asking price is a hypothesis. It becomes data only when it closes — and if it sits for four months and then closes $50,000 lower, the number that mattered was never the one on the sign.