Tell me about your house and I’ll tell you what it’s worth — from someone who knows the street, not from an algorithm that doesn’t.
You can get a number online in four seconds. You already have, probably. This is the other kind — the one built from the sales that genuinely compare to your house, adjusted for what your house is actually like.
It costs nothing, it doesn’t commit you to listing, and a fair number of these end with me saying the market isn’t there yet and you should wait.
Why the online estimate is off
Automated estimates compare your house to recent nearby sales and adjust for square footage, bedrooms, and lot size. That works reasonably well in a subdivision where four hundred houses were built from six floor plans in 2004.
It works considerably worse here, and the reason is the housing stock. Most of the Roanoke Valley’s residential core went up between 1900 and 1950, one house at a time. Two homes on the same block with identical square footage can differ by a great deal depending on what’s been done to them and what hasn’t.
Specifically, an algorithm doesn’t know:
- Whether your roof is four years old or nineteen
- Whether the wiring was updated, or whether it’s still knob-and-tube in the walls
- Whether your kitchen was renovated well or renovated cheaply
- That your basement floods, or that it doesn’t and your neighbor’s does
- How your lot sits — grade, drainage, which way the driveway faces
- That the comparable it used two streets over sold to a flipper below market
- Anything about condition, which is most of what a buyer is actually paying for
An online estimate tells you roughly where you are. It doesn’t tell you what someone will pay.
What you’ll get from me
A written range rather than a single number, because a single number implies a precision that doesn’t exist. Alongside it: the specific sales I used and why those and not others, what’s helping your value and what’s holding it back, and an honest read on timing — whether now is the moment for your particular house, or whether waiting a season serves you better.
If it’s useful, I’ll walk through the house as well. That’s where the real accuracy comes from, and it takes about an hour.
What I’d need from you
Not much. The address, a rough sense of your timeline, and anything you already know about the house that a public record wouldn’t — the new HVAC, the roof you replaced, the thing in the basement you’ve been meaning to deal with. Especially that last one. I would much rather know now.
Request your valuation
I’ll come back to you within 2 business days. You won’t be added to an email list and receive messages you didn’t ask for.
