Thinking of selling
What is your home actually worth?
Not an algorithm's guess from public records. A real number, from someone who has walked the comparable homes and knows which street carries a premium and which one does not.
Worth knowing
Why the number on Zillow is probably wrong
Automated estimates are a statistical guess built from public records and recent sales. Here is what they cannot see.
What you did to it
A remodelled kitchen, a new roof, a converted garage, a finished ADU. None of it shows up in public records, and all of it changes the number.
What the record gets wrong
Square footage, bed and bath counts, and lot size in county records are often out of date or simply incorrect. An automated estimate inherits every one of those errors.
Where it actually sits
Backing onto a busy road, a view, a cul-de-sac, a Mello-Roos district, the school boundary that runs down the middle of your street. All of it moves the price. None of it is in the data.
The honest version
I am not going to send you an instant number generated by software, because you can already get one of those for free and it may be off by six figures. What I will send you is a comparative market analysis: the actual homes near you that sold, what they had that yours does not, what yours has that they did not, and the range a buyer would realistically pay today.
It takes me a day rather than a second, and it is worth considerably more than a second.
What arrives
What I send you
The comparable sales
Recent sales near you, with what each one actually sold for, not what it was listed at. Those two numbers are often different and only one of them matters.
The adjustments
Line by line, what makes your home worth more or less than each one, so you can see how the range was built instead of being handed a figure.
What it would cost you to sell
Commission, title, escrow, transfer tax and likely repair requests, so you see what actually lands in your account, not just the headline price.
If you are 55 or older, ask me before you list
Under Proposition 19 you may be able to carry your current assessed value to your next home anywhere in California, and the order of your sale and purchase changes the result. It is worth modelling before the sign goes up, not after. How the transfer works.