Ever wondered how real estate pros come up with the dollar value of a home? The process is complex and involves evaluating the home, investigating sales of homes similar in size and characteristics in the same neighborhood, and considering the health of the current market. But tools have been developed to ease this approach and empower homebuyers and sellers with similar property estimate capabilities.
The most helpful is PropertyShark's Comparables tool, which does so much more than the automated valuation models offered by your typical real estate website. It enables users to pull prices paid for recently sold homes in an area, and has options for further narrowing the search to the finest details (for example, users can exclude foreclosure sales or sales between family members)—producing only the most relevant properties. Added bonus: this works for commercial properties, too.
Users can search for comparable properties by address, neighborhood, zip code, radius, property type or building class. Filters such as number of rooms, square footage, number of stories, square footage of lot, etc. can also be applied. After entering search criteria, the site populates with comparable properties, and gives users the estimated market value of the property in question.
The tool uses PropertyShark's sales data, taken from several public and proprietary sources, as well as the vast amount of Los Angeles property information the site hosts.
