How to Determine Home Value and Why It Matters

Wonder what your house — or a house you might buy — is really worth?

The short answer’s easy: A house is worth whatever someone will pay for it. The long answer depends on the market and whether you’re asking a lender, an agent or a county tax assessor. But why take their word for it?

Knowing how to calculate your home’s value with the help of online tools and trained professionals better prepares you to buy, sell, refinance, tap into your home’s equity or even negotiate lower property taxes.

It can also provide a picture of your overall financial health. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans say knowing the value of their home is important for precisely this reason, according to a NerdWallet survey conducted online by The Harris Poll in August 2018.

Discover five different ways to determine the value of your home below.

How to find the value of a home

1. Use online valuation tools

Searching “how much is my house worth?” online reveals dozens of home value estimators. In fact, 22% of U.S. homeowners who determined their home’s value used an online estimator, according to the survey. The technical term for these tools is automated valuation model, or AVM, and they’re typically offered by lenders or real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin.

Using public records like property transfers, deeds of ownership and tax assessments along with some mathematical modeling, these tools try to predict your home’s value based on recent sales and listing prices in the area.

“Most AVMs on real estate sites are generally for marketing and lead generation purposes,” says David Rasmussen, senior vice president of operations at Veros Real Estate Solutions. “They’re tasked with returning a value for just about every property even when data is limited. And in doing so, they water down the accuracy.”

The AVMs used by lenders and real estate professionals are different. These tools use a “confidence score” to indicate how close the AVM provider thinks an estimate is to market value. A confidence score of 90% means the estimate is within 10% of market value, for example, though each AVM has its own way of calculating confidence.

Professional-grade AVMs with confidence scores linked to accuracy are a step up from the real estate sites, Rasmussen says. But you should always talk to a local real estate expert to get more insight into any online valuation.

2. Get a comparative market analysis

When you’re ready to dive deeper into your home value, you can ask a local real estate agent for a comparative market analysis, or CMA.

Though not as detailed as a professional appraisal, a CMA provides an agent’s evaluation of the home and market to provide an estimate of value, typically for listing purposes.

Local real estate agents may provide a CMA for little or no cost, but be aware: They may do so with hopes of being hired as your selling agent.

3. Use the FHFA House Price Index Calculator

If you’re wary of AVMs but still want a quick estimate of what your home is worth, the Federal Housing Financing Agency’s house price index (HPI) calculator applies a more scientific approach.

The tool uses the “repeat sales method,” says FHFA senior economist Will Doerner. Armed with millions of mortgage transactions gathered since the 1970s, the FHFA tracks a house’s change in value from one sale to the next. Then it uses this information to estimate how values fluctuate in a given market.

Sounds great, right? Well, keep in mind the HPI calculator looks at conforming home mortgages (loans less than $726,200 and up to $1,089,300 in high-cost areas) and isn’t adjusted seasonally or for inflation.

Still, “if you have a conventional, conforming loan, the HPI calculator is an easy way to see how much your house may have appreciated over time,” Doerner says.

» MORE: Differences between conforming and nonconforming loans

4. Hire a professional appraiser

Lenders require a home appraisal before they’ll approve a mortgage, but as a property owner, you can hire an appraiser to estimate home value at any time. More than one-fourth (28%) of U.S. homeowners determined their home’s value through an appraisal, according to the survey.

“As an appraiser, my job is to give a value based on the needs of my clients,” says Ryan Lundquist, owner of an appraisal company based in Carmichael, California. “Sometimes clients want the value for a date in the past, and other times it’s a current market value for a refinance or purchase.”

Among other things, appraisers evaluate:

• Market: The region, city and neighborhood in which a home is located.

• Property: Characteristics of the house, including improvements and the land it sits on.

• Comparable properties: Sales, listings, vacancies, cost, depreciation and other factors for similar houses in the same market.

This information is combined to create a final opinion of value for the home and delivered in an official report.

» MORE: 4 ways to strengthen your home’s refinance appraisal value