Five things everyone in our community “knows” about home values — and why the numbers politely disagree.
Spend a season in a community like ours — around the nineteenth hole, on the pickleball courts, over a glass of wine on someone’s lanai — and you will hear a great deal of confident opinion about what homes here are worth. Some of it is dead-on. A surprising amount of it is quietly costing people money. Here are five of the most common beliefs I hear, and what the actual numbers have to say.
1.“Zillow already told me what my house is worth.”
Zillow is a fine place to start and a terrible place to stop. In our market, the lot under a $400,000.00 home is often worth only $30,000.00 to $40,000.00 — the other ninety percent is the house itself and what’s been done to it. A computer can’t walk through your front door, so it can’t tell an updated kitchen from a builder-grade one from 2005. It prices as if they’re the same. They are not.
2.“The home on the golf course is automatically worth more.”
Usually, yes — a protected fairway view or a premium lot can add real money the automated estimates routinely miss. But it cuts both ways. Some buyers pay dearly for that view; others won’t take the golf-ball traffic at any price. Two homes directly across the street from one another can be worth tens of thousands apart — and the reason is rarely the one everybody at the table guesses.
3.“My buyer will be a snowbird from up north.”
Sometimes. Increasingly, though, the buyer is someone relocating from a far more expensive market — a remote worker, or a move-down buyer cashing out of a bigger city — who looks at our prices and sees a bargain, because next to Naples, Sarasota, or wherever they’re coming from, it is one. Who your buyer actually is changes how a home should be priced and shown. Guess wrong and you leave money on the table.
4.“List it high — you can always come down.”
This is the most expensive myth on the list. A home draws its largest, most motivated audience in its first two weeks. Price it above where buyers are actually searching and you spend that window talking to no one — and buyers shop in price bands, so a home priced just over a threshold is invisible to everyone below it. By the time the price is “corrected,” the momentum is gone and the house has quietly gone stale. The high number didn’t protect the value. It cost it.
5.“It’s worth what I paid, plus everything I’ve put into it.”
I understand this one better than any — but the market is indifferent to your purchase price and your receipts. A buyer pays for what a home is worth to them today, not for your history with it. Sometimes that is a windfall; sometimes it stings. Either way, pricing on cost instead of value is how genuinely good homes end up sitting.
I could fill this magazine with the beliefs I hear around our communities — so consider this installment one. If there’s a piece of “wisdom” about your own home’s value you’d like tested against real numbers instead of clubhouse consensus, that happens to be my favorite kind of question.
Mark Casper
Managing Broker · Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Florida Showcase Properties
Serving Citrus Hills, Terra Vista and the surrounding country club communities
352-746-0744 · Read Mark’s full story →