Are you trying to do a home value comparison for a Northern Virginia property you’re interested in buying? This can be very difficult if you’re trying to only use sales from Zillow and other home search sites, mainly because you can’t look up sales from a specific subdivision, which are always the most relevant when trying to estimate the market value of any property.
Preparing an Accurate Home Value Comparison Analysis
Zillow and other sites have flashy new “Price This Home” tools that supposedly give you great “comparables” to use when trying to decide how much a particular property is worth. This is a smart marketing tool for these websites, but the bottom line is that just as the Zillow Zestimate and other home search sites’ algorithms are often way too broad to give you an accurate picture of value, you’ll find the same challenges and shortcomings with these new tools.
Often, a “comparable” that a home search site finds for you might be geographically close to a property you’re interested in, but it will be in a different subdivision that, for whatever reason (and there are often many reasons), has homes that sell for a lot less or a lot more than homes in the subdivision you’re considering. The most accurate way of assessing fair market value when doing a home value comparison is too look first and foremost at sales in the exact subdivision, and this is exactly what professional appraisers do. The only time you should ever consider looking outside a particular subdivision to do a home value comparison is when there have hardly been any sales in the specific subdivision in the past six to twelve months.
Email me at DarrenRobertsonHomes@gmail.com for a list of the top 10 Northern Virginia homes you can buy for zero money down in the area of your choice!
Email me to ask for a free home value comparison of the property you’re considering buying!