Fargo Real Estate Investing & Real Estate Financial Planning™ Podcast · James Orr

Secrets of Comparable Sales

·54 min·3 clips

If you cannot find recent, similar comps, your confidence in the value should be low.

The question is practical. How do you value a property you might buy or sell without acting like one sale settles the whole thing? The host starts with comparable sales, then keeps tightening the definition. A comp is not just a house that feels similar. Beds, baths, garage space, square footage, distance, age, type, style, amenities, and sale timing all have to earn their place in the search. You work the filters until you get roughly six homes that are as close to apples-to-apples as the market will give you. Then the episode shifts to the live market. Sold homes matter because they show what buyers accepted before. Active MLS listings matter because those are the homes a seller is actually up against now. Days on market are useful, but they are not a verdict by themselves. A house sitting for 300 days, or for a year and a half, might be overpriced. It might also have a condition problem that explains why nobody has moved on it. The skunk-smell example makes the point cleanly: a bad comp should not automatically pull down the value of a cleaner property. The secret here is not a magic formula. It is steady filtering, throwing out bad matches, and being honest about what each property has in common with yours and what it definitely does not. It is slow, classroom-style real estate instruction, but the method is usable.

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