What Is My East Bay Home Worth, and What Can't Zillow See?

Not on its own. An online estimate can be a rough place to start, but it is a computer working from public records, and it has never been inside your home. A real price is built from recent sales of homes that are truly comparable to yours, with adjustments for everything that makes yours different.

Tanja Odzak is a Top East Bay Realtor with eXp Realty, helping buyers and sellers in Oakland, Berkeley, Walnut Creek, Lafayette and across the East Bay. This guide explains how a price is actually built, and what to do when the number online and the number in your head do not match.

It starts with recent sales of homes that are comparable to yours. Three things decide how comparable a home is.

• Size. A home with two thousand square feet and a home with four thousand are not the same product.
• Condition. How updated is yours, and how well kept?
• Location. The street, the lot, the view, and whether it backs onto something quiet or something loud. Even within the same neighborhood, some locations carry a higher value than others.

An appraiser makes adjustments for every one of those differences, and so should anyone pricing your home.

An estimate is built from public records. It cannot see your remodeled kitchen, your solar panels, your view, your smart home features, or the work you have put off. Those are exactly the things that move a price.

This matters on East Bay homes, because so much of the housing stock is older. Two houses from the same era on the same block can sit far apart, depending on what has been updated and what has been left alone. A computer sees the year it was built. It does not see what is behind the walls.

Online estimates come from automated valuation models, often called AVMs. They are not meant to replace an appraisal or a Realtor's comparative market analysis, and the sites that publish them say so. Three things throw them off, whichever direction the market is moving.

• Public records lag. Estimates draw on county records, which can be incomplete or late. A sale can take time to be recorded, and more time to be published. Every county handles records its own way, and some are slower than others.
• Fast markets outrun the model. When there are few homes for sale, prices can climb quickly, and an estimate built on older sales trails behind. In a softening market, the same thing happens in reverse, and the estimate can sit above what buyers are now paying. Either way, it helps to know when the estimate was last updated.
• Local customs are invisible to a model. Pricing, marketing, and sales strategies differ from one East Bay city to the next. A list price set well above or below the estimate can be perfectly sensible locally, and the model has no way to know that.

Relying on one of these numbers alone can lower what you walk away with.

A great deal. An estimate cannot account for how well a home is marketed, or for the skill of the agent behind it. Good marketing and strong negotiation can make a real difference in what a home sells for. So can condition, views, the street, the layout, where the home sits on its lot, staging, and even how the home smells when buyers walk in. None of those is in a public record.

It is normal to feel your home is worth more than the neighbors', because you live there and you love it. That feeling is real, and it is one more thing no estimate can account for.

But pricing too high can cost you. A home that sits goes stale, and buyers start asking what is wrong with it. Pricing it right from the start is usually safer than planning to lower it later.

It is what I prepare for sellers who ask. I do it by hand, not by computer. I look at recent sales near your home, at the condition of the house, and at the specifics of your street, and I give you an honest read on where your home fits. You will have it within two business days, and it is free.

It is not an appraisal. An appraisal is done by a licensed appraiser, often for a lender. My review is a pricing opinion built from comparable sales, so you can decide with real information. You can ask for one on my home valuation page, or see how it works in Oakland or Berkeley.

Treating one online number as the price. It is one data point, and it was made without seeing your home.

Comparing to a neighbor's list price instead of their sold price. What a home asked and what it sold for are different numbers.

Ignoring the differences. A neighbor's home with an updated kitchen and yours with the original one are not the same product, even if they look alike from the street.

Pricing by what you need. The market pays for the home, not for the goal behind the sale.

A homeowner sees an online estimate and feels it is low, because they renovated the kitchen and added solar. The estimate has no record of either. In a value review, we look at recent sales of homes with similar updates, and the picture is different from the online number. The reverse also happens, when an estimate is higher than the market will pay because the home needs work the computer could not see. In both cases, the useful answer comes from looking at the actual home.

Start by asking for the free review. Tell me your address and what you have done to the home, and I will prepare it by hand within two business days. You can also read how pricing fits the rest of my approach on how I sell a home. This is general information, not legal, tax, or lending advice.