What Your Home Is Worth, and How Anyone Would Know

Most sellers start with a number from an online estimator and try to work out how wrong it is. That is a reasonable instinct, but it is the wrong question. The useful question is how a number gets built at all, because once you know the method you can check anyone's figure — an estimator's, a buyer's, an appraiser's, or Tim's.

Three different values, often confused

• Assessed value is a tax figure. Massachusetts assessors value property at full and fair cash value as of January 1 each year, working from arms-length sales in an earlier calendar year, and the Department of Revenue certifies those values periodically. It is a mass-appraisal product built for equitable taxation across thousands of parcels, and it lags the market by design. It is not what your house would sell for.
• Appraised value is one licensed appraiser's opinion, prepared for a lender, on a defined date, under that lender's rules. It exists to protect the loan, not to find the top of the market.
• Market value is what a willing buyer and a willing seller actually agree to, with both informed and neither under compulsion. It is only ever confirmed after the fact, by a closed sale.

All three can be different on the same house on the same day, and none of them is wrong. They answer different questions.

Why an automated estimate is a starting point, not a price

An automated valuation model reads public records and past sales and predicts a number. It works from the assessor's record of your square footage, bedroom count and lot size, which may be out of date or simply incorrect. It has not been inside. It does not know that the kitchen was redone, that the septic system is at the end of its life, that the basement takes water in March, or that the finished room over the garage was never permitted.

On a street of similar houses built in the same decade, an estimator does reasonably well. On a two-acre parcel in central Worcester County with a private well, a 1940s core, an addition and a barn, it is guessing at the features that matter most. Treat it as a rough band, not a price, and do not let anyone quote you an error percentage as if it were a measured fact. Which measure any quoted figure actually is, and how to check it separates the five numbers that all get called “the price”.

How a comparative market analysis is built

A CMA is not a search for the highest nearby sale. It is a short, disciplined argument. Done properly it goes like this:

• Select closed sales. Recent, genuinely comparable, and as close as the housing stock allows. Closed prices are evidence. List prices are asking, and pending prices are unconfirmed. In towns where the housing stock varies within a single street, the search often has to widen and the reasoning has to work harder.
• Verify each one. Pull the town assessor's record for every comparable, and check the registry of deeds for what actually transferred. A sale between relatives, an estate sale, or a transaction that included personal property is not a clean data point.
• Adjust. Each comparable is adjusted toward the subject property: more bathrooms, a garage, a finished basement, acreage, an updated kitchen, a newer roof or heating system. Adjustments are estimates, so the fewer and smaller they are, the more the conclusion is worth.
• Account for condition and story. Two houses with identical records can be twenty percent apart in fact. Someone has to have seen both, or read the photographs and the disclosure history carefully enough to know the difference.
• Apply the subject's own constraints. This is the step most often skipped, and it is where local knowledge earns its keep.

The constraints that move the number here

In this part of Worcester County, the things that quietly set a ceiling are often not cosmetic:

• Septic capacity. A Title 5 system is permitted for a specific number of bedrooms, and a house cannot be marketed beyond what its system supports. A system approaching failure is a known, priceable liability.
• Private well versus municipal water, and the testing a buyer's lender or attorney will want.
• Unpermitted finished space. If the building department has no record of it, a buyer's appraiser may not count it and a buyer's attorney will ask about it.
• Wetlands, conservation restrictions and easements, which are matters for the conservation commission and the registry rather than for opinion.
• Heating fuel and system age, roof age, electrical service, and knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring in pre-1950 stock.
• Frontage, road status, and whether the lot could be divided — which changes who the buyer is.

What to bring to the conversation

A valuation improves sharply when the seller arrives with facts: the year of the roof, furnace or boiler, and water heater; permits for any work done; the most recent Title 5 inspection report and pumping records; well test results; any survey or plot plan; the assessor's field card with corrections marked; and an honest list of what is deferred. None of this makes the number higher by itself. All of it makes the number more defensible, which is what actually matters when a buyer's appraiser shows up.

How to check any number, including Tim's

Ask for the comparables by address. Ask why each was chosen and what it was adjusted for and by how much. Ask what was excluded and why. Look up two or three of them yourself in the assessor's database and at the registry of deeds. If the comparables are reasonable, the adjustments are explained, and the conclusion follows from them, you have a valuation. If the answer is a single confident number with no sales behind it, you have an opinion. Timing questions are a separate conversation and should not be smuggled into the valuation.

A valuation is not yet a list price

What the evidence supports and what you should ask are two decisions, and the second one is strategy: where in the supported range to enter, what the preparation plan is, and what you are optimising for. That is covered on the pricing and preparation page, and the mechanics of the listing itself are on the selling page. If a buyer has already put a number in front of you, hold it against a real valuation before you respond — the comparison method is on the cash offer page.

When you want the work done properly on your own address, ask Tim and bring the documents above.