How Much Is My House Worth As-Is?

Every online estimate you can find prices a house in average condition for its area. If yours is not in average condition, the number is wrong, and it is wrong in a direction that makes every offer you receive feel insulting.

The arithmetic

As-is value is after-repair value minus what it needs, minus what somebody has to spend to carry and resell it, minus a margin for the risk. Written out:

How to get each number without paying for anything

After-repair value

Find three homes within about half a mile that sold in the last six months, similar in size, age and bedroom count, and in good condition. Sold prices, not asking prices. An agent will give you these for free, and public records carry them too.

Repair cost

One contractor walkthrough. If you cannot get one, price the big items separately: a roof, a heating system, a rewire, a kitchen. Whole-house estimates from the internet are useless because the variance is enormous.

Holding and resale

Taxes, insurance, utilities and financing for the months of work, then commission and closing costs at the end. On most houses this lands between 8 and 12 percent of ARV.

Sanity checks on any offer

• Ask which comparable sales were used, with addresses and dates. A buyer who will not tell you is telling you something.
• Ask what repair figure they assumed. If it is far above your contractor's number, that is the conversation to have.
• Get a second offer. The spread between two cash buyers on the same house is often ten percent or more, which is a lot of money for one extra phone call.

The two adjustments people forget

Time. A comparable that sold nine months ago in a moving market is not a comparable today. Prefer the last three to six months, and if nothing has sold nearby in that window, that itself is telling you something about how long your sale will take.

Like for like. A three-bedroom with a garage is not comparable to a three-bedroom without one, and a finished basement counts for very different amounts in different markets. Where you cannot find a genuine match, widen the radius before you widen the tolerance on size and condition.

Why online estimates mislead specifically here

Automated valuation models are built from public records and recent sales. They cannot see a failed roof, a gutted bathroom or a foundation crack, so they price your house as though the last owner maintained it. On a house needing significant work, that overstates the value by roughly the repair cost plus the discount buyers apply for uncertainty. The estimate is not lying to you, it is answering a different question.

Our city pages publish the real typical home value and how long homes take to go under contract in each city we cover, which is the starting point for the first line of the arithmetic above.