Signs that Your Online Home Estimate is Off
Every feature within your home can affect its current market price, tax assessment value, off-market online home estimate and future price projections. Unless your online home estimate comes straight off a recent appraisal report found within your agent’s current online listing for your home, odds are it isn’t going to accurately reflect your home’s actual current value. Even the slightest differences can cause significant price variations among comparable homes – this includes things as minute as even just a couple square feet of space. Homeowners will often have lots of questions about the value of their home, and usually they find themselves in one of the following scenarios.
When Expectations and Outcomes Don’t Align
One quite common scenario is that a home’s online estimate across various different real estate websites is much less than what the homeowner believes it is actually worth. Now, whether or not their assumption is justified, is a separate issue. Another issue homeowner’s frequently come across occurs when they are getting ready to sell their home, and their agent performs a walk through and provides the seller with their valuation. Online websites can’t accurately assess the wear and tear of a home or the impact recent improvements actually have on its value. Oftentimes homeowner’s complain that their online home estimate is way higher than what their agent believes it to be. Banks will provide automated valuations for the homes of their borrowers, and it is common for these amounts to come in below the owner’s expectation. This can have an adverse impact that owners realize when they try to refinance their home.
Is an Online Home Estimate Trustworthy?
All of the scenarios detailed above leave most homeowners asking the same question: “Is an online home estimate trustworthy?” Unfortunately, the answer isn’t quite so simple. Automated online home value estimates use computerized algorithms that have been formulated to perform analyses similar to those of a human home appraiser or real estate agent would do. They compare the subject property against other nearby homes that are considered to be “comps”, or comparables. While these systems generally apply their techniques and computations consistently, they lack the capabilities afforded by their human counterparts that compare the information of each home’s property record against one another to validate the integrity of the data. Computers also lack the ability to incorporate specific nuances that may temporarily impact a home’s value or may be unique to some comps, and not others.
Things to Consider in Your Home’s Estimate
So when you are analyzing your online home estimates, it’s important to be aware of some particularly variable situations. The older your home or neighborhood is, the greater the likelihood that the publics records are inaccurate. If your neighborhood is unique and surrounded by dissimilar districts with characteristics that substantially differentiate your neighborhood from the others located nearby, automated online estimates won’t reflect the impact this has on your home’s values. If you have made changes, improvements and renovations to your home without obtaining a permit, then they likely won’t be accurately reflected throughout comparable public information. Computer algorithms can be way off for markets that have undergone recent significant changes, or markets that seldom have any home sales.
Whatever your online home estimate issues may be, it’s impossible to track down every website and update all of your home’s relevant information contained within them. You can fine reliable websites out there if you are searching for specific information related to a home or neighborhood, especially if it is related to a fairly recent develop community, or from a county assessment.