What your home is worth
There is no instant number on this page, and that is deliberate. What there is instead: the same method an appraiser uses, run on sales you look up yourself — and a plain account of what the instant estimates elsewhere are actually doing.
Every site that gives you an instant home value is running a statistical model over public records — square footage, bed and bath count, lot size, the last recorded sale, and whatever nearby sales it can see. That model has never been inside your house. It does not know that you redid the kitchen, or that the house backs onto Ted Williams Parkway, or that your block sits in a Mello-Roos district and the one three streets over doesn't.
Those models publish their own accuracy figures, and you should go and read them on the provider's own site before you trust one. The honest summary is that a median error of a few percent sounds small and isn't: on a million-dollar house, a few percent is the difference between a sale in two weeks and a listing that sits.
They are useful for one thing — a rough order of magnitude when you're idly curious. They are not useful for setting a list price, and the gap between those two uses is where sellers lose money.
Now three or four sold comparables — not active listings. What someone asked is an opinion; what someone paid is evidence. Closest first: same school attendance area, same tract or era, similar size, sold within the last six months. Leave a block at zero to ignore it.
This calculator runs entirely in your browser. There is no server, no account, no tracking of what you enter, and nothing is sent to me. Close the tab and it's gone. If you want me to look at your actual numbers, that's a phone call — not a form.
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| Comparable | Adjusted $/sq ft | Implies |
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What this does, and where it is crude
- Each comparable is converted to a price per square foot, moved forward by your price-movement figure for the months since it sold, adjusted by your better/worse percentage, and multiplied by your square footage.
- Price per square foot is a blunt instrument. Larger homes almost always sell for less per foot than smaller ones, so a comparable much bigger or smaller than yours will pull the answer the wrong way. Keep them within about 20% of your size and the distortion stays small.
- It does not adjust for bedroom or bathroom count, lot size, garage, pool, view, single storey versus two, or a corner lot on a busy road. Those live in the better/worse percentage, which is a judgement you are making — and judgement is precisely the part a model can't do and a person can.
- It cannot see seller concessions. A recorded price of $1.2M with $25,000 credited back to the buyer is really an $1.175M sale, and public records won't tell you that. The MLS often will.
- A range is the honest output. If your three comparables imply three numbers spread across $150,000, that spread is real information: it means the market hasn't decided, and your list price is a strategy rather than a fact.
It is built for planning and comparison, not for closing. Real figures depend on your lender, your parcel, your insurer and your escrow. Nothing here is an appraisal, and no lender will accept it as one. Verify against your actual tax bill, your lender's Loan Estimate, and your escrow's settlement statement before you rely on any of it.
Where to find real sold prices
You can do a surprising amount of this yourself, for free, before you talk to anybody.
- Recorded sales. The County Assessor/Recorder property records show what actually transferred and when. This is the public spine of every valuation model in existence.
- The tax bill on a comparable. The Treasurer–Tax Collector parcel search will show you a nearby property's assessed value and, importantly, whether it carries a Mello-Roos special tax. Two houses at the same price are not the same offer to a buyer if one carries $3,000 a year of CFD and the other carries none.
- The countywide register of active districts — the Auditor's CFD list — tells you which districts exist where. Remember that school districts levy these too, so a city list showing nothing does not mean you're clear.
What public records won't give you: condition, concessions, how long it sat, how many offers it drew, and why a house two doors down sold for $80,000 less. That is MLS data plus someone who watched it happen.
Or have me do it properly
A comparative market analysis is a real piece of work: I pull the sold, pending and expired listings around you, walk through what each one actually was, adjust for the things this page can't, and give you a price band with the reasoning attached — including the case for the low end, which is the part that tends to go missing.
It takes me a couple of days. It is free, there is no obligation, and if the answer is "don't sell yet," I'll say that instead.
A sale price is the top line. What lands in your account is that minus the loan payoff, commissions, the county's transfer tax, escrow and preparation — and for a long-time owner over 55, Proposition 19 can matter more than any of it.