Do you use online tools to find out how much your Port Saint Lucie House might be worth as you plan to sell your home in the coming months?
Computer-generated numbers may not be able to calculate the best listing price for your house.
If you are researching home values because you are thinking of selling your Port St Lucie home, you’ve likely run across automated value generators or online estimates from popular real estate sites.
But are they even close to the best possible listing price for your home?
For example, we checked the automated values for a house and a piece of vacant land.
- For a single family home, one popular site suggested $650,000, while another site suggested a value of 1.2 Million.
- On a piece of vacant land, one site suggested 87k, while another site suggested a value of $170k.
Who was right?
How Automated Home Values Get Generated
Automated Home Value Estimators are computer algorithms based on data provided by various sources.
You provide the street address. It does its calculations and bam!
You get an estimated value or suggested price for your home.
Once you provide the address, those home value websites use data points gathered from multiple public sources. All that data is run through their proprietary algorithm to give you an estimated value or value range.
Automated Home Values Vary Widely from Site to Site
Your Automated Home Value or Estimated value might be close to market value where you live.
But it might be way out of range, which sets you up for false hopes when you go to list your home for sale. Or you might be leaving money on the table if the estimated value is way too low.
We’ve seen estimates differ by more than 10-20%.
When you are wondering if your home is worth $450,000, that could range from $40,000 to $80,000 swing in automated estimates.
And, they could be way out of line with each other because of different data sources and proprietary algorithms.
If the Data is Wrong, the Calculations are Wrong
Computers can only interpret DATA. If the DATA is WRONG, the Valuation is WRONG.
When we help customers price their house for listing it with us, they usually bring us what the other real estate sites suggest as a value.
The question that most of them ask us: “Which one is right, and why are they so different?”
Our Answer: Let’s Look.
Our eyes can tell us what computers cannot yet see. Here is what computers can miss when the underlying data is wrong:
- A $450,000 house was marked as sold for $540,000 due to a typo. That $90k swing will affect value calculations
- A home with a pool was included in the automated valuation for a non-pool home. The field for “pool” said no, while the pictures said yes.
Here is what computers will miss when it comes to your specific house:
- The current condition of your home
- Age of systems like Roof, HVAC, and your hot water heater.
- If permits are current and closed
These are things a human eye can see. These are the things we look into when helping you decide on a great listing price for your home.
Computers can’t tell the condition of your roof, nor know the age of your HVAC or hot water heater. Computers can’t tell if your house is a 1980s time capsule or something that has been renovated to current tastes.
You or your real estate agent can see these things with their eyes and make value judgments.
Computers can’t detect these things yet.
Get an Accurate List Price for Your Home
When setting the listing price of your home, property condition matters. roofs matter, and accurate handpicked comparables matter. These all shape one of the three pillars of home value that you can affect.
When it comes time to list your house, the automated values might give you a range, but you’ll still want an expert opinion from us if you are ready to list your home or thinking about listing in the coming months.
