CyberHomes.com and Zillow.com: Get the Value of Any Home Online

How many times have you thought to yourself - How much is my house worth? Or have you wondered how much someone else's house is worth? The traditional way to find out would be to call up a real estate agent and ask for market comparables (comps). But then you have to deal with the "prospecting" questions and get put on a mailing list...or worse, on their phone list. You could hire an appraiser to come and appraise your home, but that would cost you about $400 or so. And if you are "just curious"...perhaps about a neighbor's home...you're not going to spend $400 to find out the value, right? Well, with the advances made on the internet you can now get home values right off the web! Ok, let me say right up front that the internet can never give you as accurate of a valuation as a GOOD local real estate agent who really knows the specific property. But quite frankly, most agents just use their computers to run market comps anyway. So what are the websites you can use? There are two that I typically use - CyberHomes.com and Zillow.com

The two sites work pretty much the same way. The great thing about them is that they are very easy to use. Just type in an address and the information appears on your screen. No entering any personal info like an email or phone number.

One thing you will notice is that the two sites may show different values for the same home. Why would this be? Basically, the sites take available data and run the data, through their proprietary algorithms. In some cases, they might use different data depending on what is available to them...and in some cases the same data could yield different results because of their different algorithms. On the surface, you might think that this means the sites are "inaccurate." However, let's think about this. What do you think would happen if you asked two different real estate agents to provide a valuation on your home? Do you think they would come up with exactly the same number? NO WAY! Just like the two websites, real estate agents "decide" which data to use based on their knowledge of the market area. Then they adjust the numbers (or in other words, use their algorithms) to come up with an estimated market value. By the way, even if you paid a couple of different appraisers, I would bet their valuations would be different from each other.

The websites provide a range as well. For instance, a home might come up as having a value of $100,000, but it might show a value range of $90,000 to $110,000. I like this feature because if the range is wide, I won't put much confidence in the estimated value. But if the range is narrow I can feel more confident.

Another great thing about these sites is that they show you a trend in the value of the home. This is good because it gives you an idea of what prices are doing in your given area. You can see if the value of your home is going up or down, as well as see what values are doing in your zip code, city, etc. So even if you don't use the valuation number, you can at least see the trend.

There are plenty of other features that make these sites worthwhile...but just take a look and give it a try. What do you have to lose? You won't get follow up calls from real estate agents and it won't cost you a dime.