I found a duplex witch seems like a great deal from what I have seen on zillow.com.
What is the best way to find out the value of the property?
Every time I see zillow I go a little crazier. Do yourself a favor and delete it from your favorites. If you want comps go to your realtor. They are the best source for comps. Why fool around with some goofball free website? I have been burned by zillow (it was 30K off–oops). My wife just became a realtor. At realtor school, one of the guys from zillow came to visit her class and she read the riot act. I love my wife. She is a gal after my own heart.
I agree with brandon.A realtor’s comps are more accurate and up to date.
Zillow is great to give you a 2 second answer whether or not its worth your time to really crunch numbers, after you see that you’re in the same ballgame you need to do your own comps or have a realtor do it. I’ve seen Zillow give me damn good numbers and laughable numbers so you really need to get a realtor’s opinion. Of course there is no substitute for knowing your market and knowing what things are worth. You have to study your market and know your market, one day you will be comfortable and won’t need Zillow or a realtor, at this point you will be able to move more quickly on deals and do much better.
Thanks for all your help. How do you guys go about finding realtors? Just call any random realtor?
Try your local investor club, you might find some investor friendly realtors there that you can work with.
cyberhomes seems neat. It looks pretty accurate for the area I’m looking at. The one odd thing is it counts the basement as living space. It consistently does it amongst all the homes in the area though. Since they are all 3bd/1ba it’s still pretty simple to compare. There’s not a lot of variation.
I agree with Rich that you need to know your market. Most of the time I can tell you what a house is worth without pulling comps. However, sometimes a house pops up from my marketing that is in an area of Ft Worth where I am not completely familiar. That is when I have to pull comps. Even then, I can usually guess and get pretty danged close. As to where you find a good Realtor, Rich is also right…go to your real estate club. Just calling through the yellow pages will get you nothing but a big headache. Most realtors do get investors. I don’t prefer to have to sell myself to Realtors. They either want to work with me or they don’t.