Can anybody tell me where or how I can find the ARV of a home besides asking a realtor to pull the comps for me? The realtors just take too long getting back to me and I end up having to pass up on a possible deal. Thanks for any help!
Zillow. Fast but not terribly accurate. But now a days neither are most comps.
Remember this…you should have some idea of what a home is worth in your market. If you don’t you haven’t done NEAR enough home work.
Look at what is for sale. Go into these homes, track them, see how long they sit. By doing this you will see patterns develope. Houses that are aggressively priced sell.
Well I knew about zillow but I have read a few posts where members of this site are saying that zillow is way off and some say it’s not on the button but close enough.
The accuracy of Zillow depends on the prices of the houses in the area around it. Zillow, like many online comp services - gets theuir values by judging the values of homes within a pre-determined distance from the property, Normally .25-.50 miles. If the property is in an area where all the neighborhoods are similar to each other, similar age, similar builders similar pricing - then zillow can be quite close. In fact, many areas - especially newer areas, can often have a number of large subdivisions all built at the same time. In such a case, zillow can be quite close.
The problem is most areas, especially older areas, are not like that. They have smaller subdivisions with different builders with widely differing quality and prices. ZIllow doesn’t recognize that one property that is 40 years old-brick with 1-car garage and 2000sqft should be valued differently than a 10-year old frame house with 2-car garage at 2000sqft. Also it makes no deferentiation on the quality of the house. Is one a dump needing a gut rehab, a B&G special? To Zillow they are all pretty much the same.
Also, for a moving market like now, changing market prices have a tendancy to skew the number. Zillow goes back 12 months - and if the market has either had a significant drop or significant raise - the number will not catch for 6-12 months. In other words - Zillow is probably showing you home price estimates for properties in March-Jun 2007 right now. You need to know if your market is up, or down since then.
Finally - my own opinion is Zillow has bias to quote high. Again - no facts here but that is my opion. That was okay in a market of quickly surging prices - actually a help - but now when many areas are stable or falling - you can quickly get too high of an estimate.
The best way to find out about how it works for your area is have some local RE Agents do some CMAs on some different properties for you. Pay them if you have to. Then compare what they report to what Zillow says.
You can also make some effort and screen the info on Zillow. When you ask for comparables - cross-check the listings on the map. If you zoom out a bit on the map you can tell basically where different subdivisions are - cross-reference the comps with the map and find ones that are most recent and in the same subdivision. That will give you a more accurate number using Zillow. It is still not perfect - because you can’t see how good a shape each comp is, but it is better than the blind grab bag you get just from checking the basic estimate.
Thanks again Salverston! You ALWAYS give a lot of GOOD ingormation and we need alot of seasoned investors to be just like you to help all the rookies step their game up. Thanks!