What is my home worth?
An honest answer takes a day or two, because it comes from reading actual comparable sales rather than from a model that has never seen your property, or, in Texas, the sales around it.
Before the answer
Four numbers you already have, and why none is the price
Most sellers arrive with a figure in mind. It usually came from one of these four places, and each one is measuring something other than what a buyer will pay.
The estimate
- The number on a portal is a model, and in Texas it is a model working blind. Closed sale prices are not public record here, so the estimate is built from listing prices, tax records and what the model can infer, and the portals' own published accuracy figures are materially worse for a home that is not listed than for one that is. It is a starting point for curiosity, not for a decision.
The tax value
- The appraisal district's market value is set for every property in the county as of the first of January, mailed in April, and protestable until the fifteenth of May or thirty days after the notice, whichever is later. It is a mass appraisal for one purpose, and a homestead's appraised value is capped at ten percent a year besides, so it can sit well below the market by design. It is neither a floor nor a ceiling.
The neighbor's number
- A different house on a different day, and, in a non-disclosure state, a number you were told rather than one you can check. The sale that matters is the one that closed, adjusted for what differs, and that is exactly the sale a neighbor rarely knows precisely.
The appraisal
- The one number on this list produced under a professional standard, by a licensed appraiser, for the buyer's lender, after a contract exists. It is not available before you list and it is not what this page offers. A comparative market analysis is a different instrument, and the law requires it to say so, which it does below.
An honest numbercomes from actualcomparable sales.
What I read
The sales the model has never seen
Closed sales in your building or on your immediate block, which as a licensed agent I can read in the Austin market’s own system, adjusted for the things that genuinely differ: floor, stack and orientation in a tower, lot, condition and what the property backs onto in a house, and any view premium that is real rather than advertised. What is active right now, because that is your competition. What went under contract in the last few weeks and how quickly, which says more about current demand than anything that closed ninety days ago. And for a condominium, where the dues sit against comparable buildings, because carrying cost changes what a buyer will pay for the same rooms.
Automated valuations work reasonably well where one three-bedroom is much like the next. Central Austin is close to the opposite. On a single block in 78704 there can be an original 1940s bungalow, a restored version of the same house and a new build on a subdivided lot, and the model treats them as comparable because they are neighbors. In a tower the problem is different but no smaller: a north-facing unit on eight and a corner on forty-two with the lake in front of it come back within a few percent of each other, and the market does not price them that way.
Texas does not make closed prices public, and I am not permitted to publish them here. I can walk you through the sales your number rests on directly, with the adjustments, which is the part an estimate cannot show you even when it happens to land close.
What you get
A range, the reasoning, and the sales it rests on
Within a day or two: a price range rather than a single flattering figure, the specific comparable sales it rests on and how each was adjusted, an honest read on how long the property should take at that price in the current season, a net sheet with the closing costs a Texas seller actually pays, and the short list of condition items that would genuinely change the number. If the number you had in mind is not achievable, the valuation says so, with the sales that say why.
There is no obligation and no follow-up sequence to unsubscribe from. If you decide to sell, the strategy that follows from the number is set out on selling a home in Austin. If you decide not to, you have a number you can trust and the reasoning behind it, which is worth having whether or not the house moves.
What you receive is a comparative market analysis. Texas requires it to carry this statement, and it does: this represents an estimated sale price for this property. It is not the same as the opinion of value in an appraisal developed by a licensed appraiser under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice.