What Is My Home Actually Worth?

Almost every seller starts in the same place. You check an app. You check a second app. The two numbers are a long way apart. Then your neighbor tells you what their cousin got last spring and now there is a third number in the room.

None of the three is your home's value. They are three different guesses made by people and machines that have never been inside your house.

What a house is worth is what a specific buyer, in a specific month, with specific alternatives, is willing to pay for it. That number does not exist until somebody produces it. Everything before that is an estimate, and estimates vary because the people making them are looking at different things.

An online estimate is built from public records and past sales. It knows your square footage, your bedroom count, your lot, and roughly what sold nearby.

It does not know that your kitchen was redone four years ago. It does not know your street floods at the corner, or that your back windows face a wall. It has never seen the light in your living room at four in the afternoon.

So it does what any model does with missing information. It guesses from the average, and your house is not the average. That is why two apps looking at the same public record produce numbers that are tens of thousands apart.

They are useful for one thing: telling you the rough neighborhood of the answer. Treat them as a starting question, not a finishing one.

When I work out what a home is worth, I start with sales, not listings. A listing is somebody's ask. A sale is two people agreeing.

Then I narrow it hard. Same block where I can get it. Same school boundary. Same era of construction. Same orientation, because a north-facing back yard and a south-facing one are different products in this climate. Recent enough that the market has not moved underneath the number.

Then I walk your house, because the adjustment is the actual work. What did that sold home have that yours does not. What do you have that it did not. A finished garage, a real primary bathroom, a flat usable yard instead of a slope. Those are the things that separate two houses with identical listings.

And then the part almost nobody does: I look at what your likely buyer is choosing between right now. A home with three close alternatives on the market this month behaves completely differently from one with none.

Here is the part that surprises people. Once we know what your house is worth, we still have to decide what to list it at, and those are two separate decisions.

List at the value and you get a normal, orderly sale. List below it deliberately and you invite a crowd, and the crowd decides the final number. List above it and you spend your best weeks waiting for a buyer who was never going to show up.

All three are real strategies with real tradeoffs. What matters is that somebody chose on purpose, and can tell you which one they chose and why.

I wrote about how to tell the difference in the list price is a strategy.

People bring me this one a lot, usually because it is the only official-looking number they have.

Your assessed value is not your market value and was never meant to be. In California, Proposition 13 limits how fast assessed value can rise while you own the home, so a house somebody bought decades ago can carry an assessment nowhere near what it would sell for today. That gap is not an error. It is the law working as designed.

It matters enormously for your property tax bill and for what a future buyer will pay in taxes. It tells you almost nothing about your sale price.

The same goes for what you paid, and for what you owe. Both feel like they should anchor the number. Neither has anything to do with what a buyer will pay. A buyer does not care what your mortgage balance is, and pricing to cover it is the fastest way to sit on the market.

A few things quietly do more to your final price than square footage does.

Condition against the comparable, not against your memory. Your house is compared to what sold last month, not to how it looked when you bought it.

How it shows in the first ten seconds. Buyers decide fast and then look for reasons. A dark entry costs real money and no appraiser will ever write it down.

What else is available. Being the only three bedroom on the market in your school boundary is worth more than any renovation you could do.

How it gets launched. More on that in how I bring a home to market, because the first week decides more than most sellers realize.

The thing that makes valuation here harder than most places is how narrow the boundaries are.

A school line can run down the middle of a street. One side feeds one elementary school and the other side feeds a different one, and families searching for the first will filter the second out of their results entirely. Those two houses are not competing for the same buyer, so they do not carry the same value, no matter how identical they look.

Same with a cut-through street against a quiet interior one two hundred feet away. Same with a lot that backs onto a road against one that backs onto other yards.

None of that is visible in a search app, and all of it is visible to the buyer standing in your kitchen. It is the single biggest reason a number from a screen can be badly wrong in either direction.

If you are thinking about selling in the next year, get a real read now rather than later. Not because you should list now, but because the honest number changes what you do next. Some homes need nothing. Some need three thousand dollars of work that returns many times over. You cannot tell which yours is from an app.

If you are just curious what you are sitting on, that is a completely reasonable thing to want to know and it does not commit you to anything.

Either way, get in touch and I will walk it with you. English or Russian, whichever is easier.

You can also see what your home is worth and how I sell a home.