How much is my home worth? In Summit County, Ohio, the average single family property is worth roughly $205,000 with a standard deviation of $150,000 as of May, 2022. That means 70% of all homes are worth anywhere between ~$50,000 and $350,000. If you think your home is outside of that range, you’re already one standard deviation away from the mean.

We crunched the numbers using over 18,000 single family home sales in the Summit County area over the past three years to see how you measure up against others in the same county as you.

Due to the limitations of using such a huge population of data, homes on the extreme end of either range are underrepresented. If you have a 1-bed, 1-bath ranch in Akron that’s suffering from serious deferred maintenance, it’s going to be harder to compare to the rest of the homes in the county. Similarly, if you own a sprawling, 3000 square-foot-plus Colonial on an acre lot in Hudson, you’re going to be a serious outlier. After all, we’re looking at averages — not extremes. That doesn’t mean your home isn’t worth more than half a million, but right off the bat, we can confidently say that if your house is in Summit County, it will probably sell for $50,000-$350,000. That’s quite a range, so it shouldn’t come as too big of a shock.

The Safest Bet is a Professional Appraisal

In order to really know how much your home is worth, you need a professional appraisal. As experts in the Summit County, Portage County, and Cuyahoga County areas, that’s what we do. If that’s something you’re interested in, please contact us.

However, if you aren’t looking to buy, sell, or refinance, you might not want to shell out $300-450 for a professional appraisal of your home. If you truly have no idea how much your home is worth, automated valuation methodology can give you a general ballpark range to work with.

How to Determine Your Home’s Value

For a layman, there are three basic steps to come up with a good idea of how much your home is worth:

1. Start With Automated Valuation Methods
2. Find Similar Homes That Sold Recently
3. Adjust for Features (Advanced Technique)

When appraisers are performing the sales comparison approach, this is — more or less — what they do. Since they’re experienced in the market, though, there’s really no point in looking at the automated valuation methods, since they can be off by 10-50%. If it was perfectly accurate, I’d be out of a job. Keep in mind that an algorithm can’t see inside your home. If you have settlement in the basement, a roof that’s caving in, and features that haven’t been updated since the 1960s, your home is going to be worth much less than what these models tell you.

1. Start with Automated Valuation Methods (Zillow, Redfin, Chase…)

Automated valuation methodology (AVM) attempts to appraise homes in large batches. While it sounds complicated at first, the algorithm behind it is just as simple as what I did to make that bell curve. They compile all the homes inside a certain zip code and find the median sale, adjusted for bedrooms and baths. So, a 2-bed, 2-bath is compared to all the other 2-bed, 2-baths in that zip code. As you can probably tell, this leaves out an enormous amount of really important, high-impact data. Each algorithm attempts to adjust for that high-impact data, but it varies from market to market, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. Additionally, sometimes the auditor misjudges how many bedrooms and bathrooms a home has, either inflating or deflating the value. That’s why appraisers are hired, so that they can verify the true size, quality, and condition of the home (among other things, of course).

Still, you can plug your address into the following AVMs and get a number that’s probably in the ballpark:

• Zillow’s “Zestimate.”
• Redfin’s “home value estimate.”
• Rocket Home’s “free property report.”

I have no connection with any of these services. If you plug in your address to any of them, don’t be surprised when you get a bunch of mail in your mailbox begging you to sell your home.

2. Find Similar Homes with Recent Transactions

Without MLS access, this step is a bit more difficult. You’re going to have to use the Summit County Auditor’s “Property Sales Information” search to try to find homes that are similar to yours. However, just keep an eye out for any neighbors selling homes similar to yours, and then check Zillow to see how much they listed it for. When it looks like the new neighbors have moved in, check the Summit County Auditor again to find the actual transaction amount.

3. Adjust for Any Additional Features (Advanced)

Finally, if you’re really interested in doing the type of analysis that an appraiser might do, take the recent sales and try to adjust the comparable so it more accurately reflects the true value of your home. For example, if your neighbor’s home is identical to yours except they have a finished basement and you don’t, you can try finding another couple sales (matched pairs) to reflect that missing feature. You’ll find one home with a finished basement and a nearly identical home without a finished basement to find out how much that feature is worth. This step can obviously be time consuming, so it might be easier to guesstimate the value of each feature depending on its cost:

• Another bedroom: $2,500-$10,000
• Another bathroom: $2,500-$10,000
• An additional square foot: $15-50 (no adjustment for anything less than 100sf)
• Finished Basement: $7,500-$20,000
• Deck: $3,000-$6,000
• Enclosed Porch: $4,000-$8,000
• An additional bay in the garage: $2,500-$5,000

Appraisers use the contributory value of each feature to adjust comparables, which means we calculate how much the feature is worth based on how much actual market participants are willing to pay for it. For salient features (like those listed above), this usually correlates with the cost of that feature pretty highly, in the real of 60-120%. For low-impact features that a typical buyer doesn’t care about (like a koi pond or a basketball court in the backyard), no adjustment will be made. Since we also have access to sales contract data, this process is a bit more accessible.

However, when you use all three steps above in tandem, you’ll arrive at a figure that’s much closer than the AVM would give you. In many cases, it will open your eyes to the inaccuracies of those models.

Going back to the data that I compiled above, you can get a good idea of how “house-rich” you are in comparison to every other homeowner in Summit County.

The data skews low, so if your property is worth even $0-50,000, it’s worth more than almost 20% of all homes in Summit County. Here’s how the rest stack up:

If your home is worth X, it’s worth more than X% of homes in Summit County:

• $50-100k: ~28% of homes
• $100-$150k: ~37% of homes
• $150k-$200k: ~47% of homes
• $200k-$250k: ~61% of homes
• $250k-$300k: ~72% of homes
• $300k-$350k: ~79% of homes
• $350k-$400k: ~85% of homes
• $400k-$450k: ~93% of homes
• $450k-$500k: ~96%+ of homes

Conclusion: How Much is My Home Worth? Limitations of the Data

We didn’t filter non arm’s length transactions. When a property is sold to a family member from another family member, the transaction is considered “non arm’s length.” These types of transactions are prohibited when selecting comparables for the sales comparison approach. Instead, we strictly use “arm’s length” comparables: those that have been adequately exposed to the market and sold to someone with which the seller doesn’t have a relationship. However, many non arm’s length transactions aren’t included in the multiple listing service, since a seller is unlikely to have a real estate salesperson list the house if they just plan on selling it to a loved one.

Additionally, since you only have public records data to work with, you don’t have access to concessions. Did that $255,000 sale price contain $5,000 of concessions? That’s a huge amount of money that can throw off your final valuation.

Finally, all numbers based on averages are usually going to ignore some important factors. While it’s a nice place to start, mispricing your home by even $5,000-$10,000 could cost you, well, thousands of dollars. If you want a professional appraisal of your home, please contact us.