Your Austin TX House

Your Austin house is a valuable asset, and also less liquid than most other assets. It’s not like there is a stock price that you can reference and easily see the value of your house. So how do you value it?

The tax assessor gives a value for your home each year, which is essentially a guess. They haven’t seen the inside of your home, they don’t know if you’ve updated the kitchen, or if your house has obsolescent features. So that’s not really a reliable gauge of how much your house is worth. For people in Travis County, you can check the TCAD website to see their latest guess.

You can go to Zillow or Trulia and get an estimate for your address. Those sites do the best they can with the data available, which in Texas does not include sold price data. Texas is a non disclosure state, which means that actual sold price data is confidential. Zillow doesn’t know it!

If you’ve ever bought or sold anything on craigslist, you’ll notice that the items that are for sale with prices attached are exactly that – still for sale. So the items that have sold have been deleted. You don’t know those list prices as they’re not visible, and you don’t know what they actually sold for. It’s the same with Zillow. If you look at their data for Travis County, the median price error is 14.9%. That’s incredible. 15% off! These sites are great for finding out about neighborhoods, but not for pricing your home. Imagine if your stock broker misquoted your portfolio by 15%?!!

So how do you find a value for your home? There are a couple of ways.

The first is to pay for an appraisal by a licensed appraiser. That may set you back around $450, but the appraiser will come to your house, breeze through and take measurements and note condition and produce a report based on actual sales data.

The second is to call an Austin REALTOR over and ask them for a valuation. They use a similar process, and sometimes do this at no cost.

The third is to check out an Austin Housing Market snapshot, which will give you a sense for the sales prices of the neighborhood. (To do this you have to play the role of a seller – Texas is a non disclosure state, and the only way to divulge this data is to share it with a prospective home seller, appraiser or Realtor). This is the only way to get actual sold price data for homes in your Austin neighborhood.  Of course, you still have to make adjustments for your actual home amenities, but this should get you in the ball park, compared to Zillow which will get you within 15% of the price.