What is your Property Worth?

Buying? Selling? How do you find home values?

There are many free sites (free is good) and some are, of course, better than others. Following are some to consider as you search:

Zillow is a popular site for property information and gives a virtual earth street map showing surrounding values.

Real Estate ABC gives a fantastic chart of recent area sales.

Realestate.com works to look up properties listed by Realtors.

Trulia is another popular site for property information, stats and trends.

If you get into the business in a big way, you may want to pay for a good, reliable service. Courthouse Retrieval System is a great resource (check to see if it is available in your state). CRS gives current property information and allows custom searches. It gives you property tax records, interactive maps, sales and mortgage information, real estate valuations, mailing lists, demographics, school reports, on and on. It is a paid service but well worth the investment.

Pricing land? Check LandWatch.

For county and zip code information, check CityData.

There’s a lot of property information available with just the click of a mouse so you can find everything you need to know before you buy or list your property.

Warning: some of these sites show surrounding homes with price estimates (sometimes shown on every roof). Use this information only for approximations. I looked at a property on one of these maps and the location was off by about 15 houses! My property showed way up the street from where it is actually located, so I “assumed” that all of the properties were being shown in the wrong locations.

What system do you use? What’s been your experience with your service?