I hear this all the time, “I can see the value of my house on Zillow but you gave me a different value, why?”.
You find yourself online on a website such as Zillow, Trulia and other well-known sites that give you an estimate of how much your house is worth and you take that value to heart and commit it to memory.
You follow it everyday to see if the value of your house is depreciating or appreciating. Then one day a professional real estate agent comes along to tell you not to believe the value you have been following for quite a while, because it is inaccurate. What? That seems absurd, you are a smart and intelligent person, you can understand numbers and logic so this does not make sense to you at all.
What could a professional real estate agent, who deals with clients buying and selling their homes on a daily basis see or know that can disprove your theory?
I am sorry to differ from what you have been accustomed to online. Websites like Zillow do have a disclaimer for estimated home values such as a Zestimate®.
A Zestimate® home valuation is Zillow’s estimated market value. It is not an appraisal. Use it as a starting point to determine a home’s value.
Most of these automated home value estimates mainly take the size or square footage of the home into consideration but in the real world of real estate, the value of a home is dependent on a whole lot of other factors such as
- Location
- Views
- Amenities
- Upgrades
- Move in ready status
- Inventory of like homes
- Obsolescence; Functional, External; e.g. backing to a street, etc
- What current buyers in that neighborhood are looking for, Home buyers ultimately determine value by what they ready and willing to pay for a home.
and a whole lot more.
A real estate professional takes a lot into consideration before pricing a home. Online Websites, don’t know your neighborhood, subdivision etc. They calculate the estimated value based on algorithms and other mathematical calculations.
A real estate professional works with buyers and sellers everyday, knows your city, streets, inventory, etc so what you get from a real estate professional is more accurate than Zillow and the rest. They give you an idea of the market but not a realistic value.
Put in a property address to see how much homes are actually selling for in your neighborhood
Finding out how much homes are selling for in your neighborhood and if buyers are paying full asking price, more or less than the asking price is a great way to know how real estate is doing in your neck of woods, but a real estate professional is the best resource for pricing your home instead of relying on the value of your house on Zillow or other automated websites.