Zillow’s Zestimate, the county’s assessed value, and what your neighbor’s house sold for are three different numbers, and none of them is what your specific house would sell for today. An actual answer comes from comparable sales, adjusted for your property’s condition, lot, and features, checked against what is moving in your exact price band right now.

Why online estimates miss

A Zestimate is a computer model built from public records and recent sales in your area. It does not know your kitchen was updated three years ago, that your lot backs up to open space, or that a shop building sits behind your house, worth thousands of dollars to the right buyer. In Grants Pass and the wider Rogue Valley, where a fixer, a mid-range family home, and a custom build can sit within a few hundred feet of each other, the gap between the model and the actual sale price tends to run wide. The county’s assessed value is a different problem: under Oregon’s Measure 50, assessed value growth is capped every year regardless of what the market does, so a home someone has owned for a decade can carry an assessed value tens of thousands of dollars below what it would actually sell for. Neither number was built to answer your question.

What I actually pull together

I run a full comparative market analysis: the sold comps in your immediate market, adjusted line by line for condition, square footage, lot size, and upgrades, using per-unit dollar figures rather than a guess. I check the current active competition in your price band and how fast it is moving, then cross-reference against MLS-level market data public sites cannot see, the exact count of active, pending, and sold listings in your specific price range, not just a citywide average. I pull the county’s assessed value and Real Market Value and Zillow’s Zestimate too, so you know exactly how those numbers compare to the actual one and why. Zoning, easements, insurability, anything about the property itself that could move price gets checked, not guessed at.

What a typical CMA leaves out

Most agents hand you three comps pulled from the MLS in twenty minutes, aimed at getting your signature on a listing agreement. Most online tools hand you one number and no reasoning behind it. Mine goes further, and I show every step of it so you can see exactly how your number was built.

• Every comp confirmed against the county recorder’s recorded sale price, not the number a portal happens to display.
• A three-window market read, one year back, six months back, and the current quarter, so you see which direction your market is moving, not only where it sits today.
• Active, pending, and sold counts in your exact price band, pulled from my own MLS access. Zillow and Redfin do not publish that.
• Your Zestimate and the county’s assessed value and Real Market Value, all pulled and reconciled against your comp-based number, so you know exactly how they compare and why they differ.
• Zoning, easements, insurability, and any use restriction checked for your specific parcel, not assumed from the neighborhood.
• Your property’s building permit history, pulled directly from the county, so unpermitted work surfaces now instead of during a buyer’s inspection.
• The exact school your home is assigned to, pulled from the district’s boundary map, not the neighborhood’s reputation.
• A straight read on any solar or energy system on the property, owned versus leased, and what it does to your sale, from someone who spent a decade in solar before real estate.
• Every adjustment for condition, square footage, lot size, and upgrades, priced with an actual dollar figure and shown in the table, not folded into a black box.
• A written net proceeds estimate: what you would walk away with after commission and closing costs.

Whenever a property I have written a CMA for gets a professional appraisal, I log the result against my own number, so my process keeps calibrating against independent data instead of running on the same model forever.

How you get yours

Your Seller’s CMA is free. Fill in your details below and I will call to gather a few specifics about your property, then put your full written report together: the comps, the adjustments, the market read, and a recommended price with the reasoning behind it. It is yours to keep, whether you list with me, list with someone else, or do nothing at all.

More questions: Is it a buyer’s or seller’s market right now? · How much does a realtor cost in Oregon? · Should I wait until the economy is better to sell my home?