Home Value Estimator Tool

Many home owners in the Seattle, WA housing market are curious to know their home’s value and choose to use our automated (and free) Home Value Estimator to help them keep track of their home value. You can get your home valuation instantly (via tech), plus have an updated version emailed to you periodically so you an keep track of your home’s equity online – just as you would for your bank account or stock portfolio.

Have a second home or investment property? No problem. You can use this for more than one address.

Click here to use our Free, Automated and Regularly Updating Home Value Estimator Tool.

What If An Automated Home Value Estimate Won’t Work For You?

For many types of homes, an automated Home Evaluation Tool doesn’t give the most accurate information. These tools work best on “typical” homes that are standard for the area – for example, condos: where each unit is similar to the next. Or a housing development where many homes maybe “cookie cutters” of the other similarly built homes down the street.

However, we know that many of our beautiful neighborhoods in the greater Seattle area do not have this level of uniformity. You might have a house next door to a coffee shop. Or a 3-story townhouse next to a historic district. Some homes have views of the water, and some are looking at the back of a billboard or into somebody else’s kitchen. Other factors like parking availability and other amenities may be important to home owners but not readily apparent on the “public data” that automated home estimators use to compile their data.

For this reason, if you need a very accurate evaluation of home your home, it may be best to talk with a real estate agent (like us!) or have a personal evaluation of your homes value, instead of an automated one.

You can start by entering your address here!

How Does Your Home Value Estimation Work?

To use our automated Home Value Estimation Software For Free, you must live in the greater Seattle area – King County, Snohomish County, or Pierce County. You can try it if you live outside of these areas but it may be harder for the tool to pull accurate data for you.

The tool is called “HomeBot” and this is a software service that we pay for and license to our clients and friends so that they can learn more about their homes. As professional real estate brokers and community members, we want to be able to offer services to local neighbors in the area so we can position ourselves as experts and provide helpful, friendly updates to you, in the hopes that if you have future real estate needs, you would consider using our services. It’s just one more way we aim to “serve not sell” in our community.

When you click the button to receive your automated home valuation, you’ll be asked some information about your home. Then HomeBot will pull public records to learn more about your home (such as the year built, lot size and square footage) and compare that to other homes that have recently sold in the area.

You’ll receive your home value estimate right away AND you’ll have the opportunity to get updates about the value of your home, since it’s always changing (usually for the better) and it can be fun to watch your equity grow as you pay down your mortgage, neighborhood values go up, and you can even track what it might rent for if you were to rent it out traditionally or as a short term vacation rental.

Bear in mind that the tool doesn’t know about any updates or remodeling you’ve done to the home. It “assumes” your home is “typical” for the area, and similar to other homes for sale nearby.

However, if your home is especially nice (or maybe in need of repair) the automated system has no way to tell that information. In that case, it might be best to talk to one of our specialists who can evaluate your property “by hand” and take into account any peculiarities about it that might increase or decrease the value.

We offer this as a free service to folks who are thinking about selling their home … or maybe they’re not sure if they want to sell, and getting a good estimate of the value of the property is an important part of making their decisions.

Why Might You Need A Home Value Estimate?

People want to know the value of their homes for many reasons.  Commonly, these include:

• Tracking equity to decide on whether to sell their home
• Pulling out home equity in a refinance to access their capital or setting up a HELOC for other projects.  In addition to finding the market value of their home, these folks might benefit from using a refinance savings calculator to see what their new payment would be given current interest rates.
• Thinking about retirement, and want to sell or get a reverse mortgage to use the large equity in their home to fund their retirement.

In the real estate business, we call this a “CMA” or “Comparable Market Analysis when we do it by hand.  Automated tools are great for giving you a quick snapshot for where your home stands relative to others, or to help you track general real estate trends in the housing market.

However, if you need a more accurate home value, a personal visit to your home to look at its condition as well as a a work-up of the data will give you the best idea.

At the end of the day, the “market” of buyers and sellers is really who determines the value, so sometimes you don’t know for sure until you put the home on the market and see what happens.

What is the most accurate home value estimator?

There are several free programs on the internet (Like Redfin and Zillow) that can give you an estimate of your real estate value.  I have actually found that they fluctuate in accuracy – sometimes being too high, sometimes being too low, sometimes being WAY off. 

Even our licensed service (that we pay for, and make available for FREE to you) is not perfect. 

How accurate each program is on a given day can depend on how they have adjusted their algorithms to calculate home values and what metrics they track, and how they weight them.  Often looking at several different programs will give you a good sense of where your house stands, but nothing replaces the human touch and good old fashioned common sense.

Is Zillow accurate for home values?

Many home buyers focus their home search through websites like Zillow and Trulia (which is owned by Zillow) because they have great data and show up easily in the search engines.  They are are a real center of information, and can help you connect to real estate agents or mortgage lenders who advertise there.

This is a great place to get information, but you can also get bombarded by advertising and calls from dozens of agents once you start entering your information.

I prefer to meet my clients by leading with VALUE and SERVICE and giving them the information they’re looking for right up front – making it easy to shop on line and learn about things like getting a mortgage, current interest rates, loans and finding a house, before I ever expect them to make a choice to work with me as the agent who will be best to help them buy a home.

How do you estimate value of house?

Estimating the value of the house is not easy – it’s part art, part science.  Appraisers get separate certifications to help them estimate, and even so, three different appraisers may come up with three separate values for a home, although they should be fairly close in range.

Most people will look for other property sales in the area that are similar to the “subject property”  they will make comparisons and adjust the value based on differences including “hard data” like lot size, number of bedrooms, and square footage, as well as “softer” criteria, like the quality of the home, view and neighborhood.

We never truly know the market value for a home until we’ve put it on the market and discovered what a willing buyer and seller will agree to.

How Can I Help You?

If you would like to learn more about the Home Selling Process, we are here to help.

As a real estate agent, I am here to connect with home owners to help them make wise real estate decisions.  Whether they are considering a sale of their property, want to refinance, or are even considering becoming a landlord, I can help you make wise choices by providing you with accurate data and market insight based on my years of industry experience.

You will find this website a true learning center as you read through our articles and blogs to get the information you need about the pros and cons of selling, refinancing, and investing.  We even have other free resources like a mortgage calculator you can use.

If you are open to feedback and advise, we help each consumer get their questions answered and carefully considered during our 15-minute phone consultations.  Then we’ll lay out a menu of options so you can make the best choice for you.