What's your home worth?

How this number is worked out

We look for homes that actually sold near you — same neighbourhood first, widening only if we have to — and keep the ones close to yours on size, bedrooms, baths, style and age. Waterfront is only ever compared to waterfront.

You get a range rather than a single number because that is the honest answer. An estimate built from sale records has never been inside your house. It is good for telling you roughly where you stand. It cannot price your home.

Why the gap matters

Two houses on the same street, same square footage, same year, can be forty thousand dollars apart. One has a kitchen from this decade and a dry basement. The other has neither. No public record holds that difference, so no automated estimate can price it — yours included.

Getting it wrong costs money in both directions, and they are not symmetrical. Price under and you leave the difference on the table in a week. Price over and you sit — and a listing that sits gets price cuts, and price cuts are read by every buyer as a signal that something is wrong with the house. The first two weeks are when most of the serious interest arrives. You get one pass at them.

What a full CMA actually involves

A comparative market analysis is what an agent does before recommending a price. It is the same idea as the estimate above, done properly, with the parts a database cannot reach.

1. 1Someone walks the houseCondition, light, layout, what has been updated and when, what a buyer will notice in the first thirty seconds and what they will find on the inspection. This is the part no algorithm has.
2. 2Comparables are chosen, not collectedRecent, close, and genuinely similar — then adjusted. A comparable with a finished basement and yours without is not a match until that difference has a number on it.
3. 3What did not sell gets read tooExpired and withdrawn listings nearby say where the ceiling is. Sold homes tell you what buyers paid; unsold ones tell you what they refused to.
4. 4Today's competition is countedYou are not priced against last spring. You are priced against what a buyer can see this weekend, and how many of those there are changes the answer.
5. 5You get a range and the reasoningNot one number handed down. A range, what sits at each end of it, and what you could do — or decline to do — to move within it.