How Much Are Homes Selling for in My Neighborhood?

Table of Content

• Steering in Real Estate: What Prospective Homebuyers Should Know
• Exploring Parks in Long Beach: A Guide to Nature and Recreation in the City of Long Beach
• How To Find Selling Prices
• Real Estate Comps: How to Find Comparables for Real Estate
• How to Calculate the Square Footage of a House
• Discover a place you’ll love to live
• Your questions about house prices answered

Real estate agents use comps from the local multiple listing service to create a comparative market analysis . It’s a collection of nearby comps, put together to help an agent and seller decide on a good listing price. Savvy real estate agents regularly run comps to keep an eye on their local market and gauge overall trends. An agent or broker will use comps to suggest a listing price for a home that’s about to go to market and represents a fair market price. Agents also have access to any pending sales, which would affect real estate comps and CMA reports.

But if the property is in a non-disclosure state you may be completely out of luck. In many non-disclosure states, even local tax and appraisals officials, and popular realtor sites like Zillow, have to get their information from local realtors. The content on this site is not intended to provide legal, financial or real estate advice. It is for information purposes only, and any links provided are for the user's convenience. Please seek the services of a legal, accounting or real estate professional prior to any real estate transaction.

Steering in Real Estate: What Prospective Homebuyers Should Know

Back then, it wasn’t easy to find publicly available data online – you needed the help of an inside connection like a real estate agent or home appraiser to pull comparable sales off of the MLS . Today there’s much more information available to the public, and you can now access comps with an online search. Let’s explore how to find real estate comps for your area. On top of that, a real estate agent has expertise in the local market.

Buyers reference comparables to decide how much to offer on a home. More specifically, they want to make sure they don’t overpay for the home they’re buying. If the home has a strange layout or is partitioned into smaller, separate rooms, it can bring down the value and the sales price. Consider houses built within a 5-year range of your home being built. It’s often assumed that an older home needs work and hasn’t been updated. While this isn’t always the case, a newer home will initially have a higher fair market value.

Exploring Parks in Long Beach: A Guide to Nature and Recreation in the City of Long Beach

If there is a new real estate transaction relating to the property, it’ll pull up if it’s in the system. After all, if one home has 1000 square feet and another 2000 square feet, you are buying a larger home, and it should cost more to purchase. Square footage will raise or lower the value of the real estate comps you’re looking at. The best comps for you will be properties that are comparable to yours. Home trends that could increase the value of your home, such as being a waterfront property or having a view.

Understanding real estate comparables and the state of the market in your local area is essential. It can help you make an informed decision about buying or selling a property. When a homeowner updates a bathroom or renovates a kitchen, their home value typically increases. Consider any renovations or upgrades you see in your real estate comps and how those compare to your home’s features.

How To Find Selling Prices

Making home improvements can also increase the value of your house. Updating your home’s exterior, including the roof, siding, doors or deck often increase the true value of your home, which is what buyers are willing to pay for the property. Depending on the extent of the change, addition or renovation, and the ability of Zillow to identify it, some changes may be reflected in the Zestimate while others may not.

Once you’ve nailed down your search criteria, you can zoom in on the map and look at all the recently sold homes in your neighborhood and find the ones that are the most comparable to yours. Scrolling down slightly on the same page will also show the most recently sold homes in the same neighborhood. If you scroll down even further to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a heading titled “Nearby Recently Sold Homes,” and a “View More Recently Sold Homes” button right below. HM Land Registry updates their sold house prices data on the 20th day of each month. However, the time between the sale of a property and the registration of this information varies between a few weeks, and a number of months.

Real Estate Comps: How to Find Comparables for Real Estate

While you won’t get a long list of all the home sales, you can ask for property records for a specific home, which will include the selling price. Depending on your area, you may be able to conduct this search on your own or you might have to request a clerk to assist. You can find selling prices of homes in your area through your real estate agent, listing sites, or by visiting your local county clerk’s office. Begin with your Zestimate, a useful starting point to help you determine an independent and unbiased assessment of what your home might be worth in today’s market.

If you still receive the local newspaper, there’s a good chance that it will include home sales in the announcements section. Many counties stipulate that this information be made available to the public via publishing within weeks of a sale’s close. Save this search to get email alerts when listings hit the market. When you want to find out the history of a house, you can do a fair amount of research online. The site homedisclosure.com can give you some information, especially about the local area, but won’t dig deep into previous owners.

How to Calculate the Square Footage of a House

And to get the best information available, it’s wise to pursue some, if not all, of the avenues discussed above. By doing your due diligence, you’ll be fully prepared to buy or sell your home at the optimal price point. Finally, there are some occasions where the seller decides to sell the home by themselves. So, if you see a home that’s “for sale by owner,” you’ll have to speak to them in person to discover the selling price. Although you can typically find the selling price of a home in your area with some digging, the best way to go about finding this information is through your real estate agent. With thousands of agents to choose from, it's easy to find an expert in your local market to sell your home quickly – for the best price.

The best way to find out how much a house sold for is to ask a local real estate agent who can look up the house on the multiple listing service . The MLS is a database available to agents who use it to list homes, find homes for sale, and share with each other the sold data for any property listed. Zillow has a nationwide median error rate of 1.9 percent for on-market homes and 6.9 percent for off-market homes. Where your Zestimate falls on this spectrum highly depends on what public data about your home and comparable homes in your area is available. This data includes your home’s features, like square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and recent updates, as well as local real estate market trends, tax assessments, and prior sales. Some counties and cities have more detailed public information available compared to others.

It’s updated regularly based on market conditions and can show you the longer price trends in your area. A comp, which is an abbreviation for comparable sale, is a recently sold home in your area that’s similar to your home in location, size, condition and features. Focus on homes that have been sold within a 3- to 6-month period. In a hot market that favors the seller, you may want to focus on an even shorter timeframe. In some areas, a property’s value can change from neighborhood to neighborhood, from block to block, or even within 100 yards.

The sales volume in your area will also drive the fair market price on any home being listed for sale. For example, if your housing market is currently a seller’s market and homes are selling quickly, buyers may be making higher offers than they would be in a market that’s not so competitive. Zillow scrapes its data from 3rd party sources that access public records. The site won’t receive data from county offices governed by non-disclosure laws, they have to rely on local agents directly. Zillow also gets data when agents update the information on their Zillow profiles. But sometimes this data does not reflect the true net to the seller.

Discover everything we know about a property, together with its sold price history. All of the online search sites you would use pull their data from the MLS. However, they are not updated as frequently, nor do they have as robust a database.