Home Values & Property Values

Learn How to Estimate the Value of Your Home

On PropertyShark.com we provide you with professional tools to estimate your home or property value. How to start? Do a comparables search on your target home that queries recently sold homes in your area.

Comparables or simply 'comps' is considered the best tool to estimate home values and is widely used by real estate professionals, including appraisers, lenders and brokers.

On PropertyShark, you can use a wide array of filters and search criteria when running a comparables search. To estimate the value of your home or the property you want to buy you can pull out recently sold homes that are located within a specific distance (e.g. 1 mile) from your target home.

In certain areas, you can pull out recently sold homes by directly drawing an area on a map, which gives you the freedom to include or exclude recently sold homes on a given street or block.

If you are looking for general trends for property values you can always do a zip code search, which pulls out recently sold homes in a given zip code.

Property Value Report (Comparables Report)

After you have run an initial comps search you have to carefully select what home sales you want to include in your valuation. Not all returned home sales are arms-length-transactions, that is property sales conducted between two independent and unrelated parties. You would not want to include, when estimating your property value, sales between family members, non-profit organizations or any other sale that is performed at a below-market price. This types of sales will bring the estimated value of your home down.

On the other hand, you would also want to exclude package sales. These are single transactions made for multiple properties. In public documents each property will retain the price of the entire transaction. Although, these types of transactions don't happen very often, they could artificially inflate the value estimation of your home.

PropertyShark provides in many regions, data and tools to make flagging of non arms-length-transactions easy, even for non-professionals: the seller and buyer, package deals are flagged with an 'M', the listing descrription, distressed property information.