also thankfully 2 homes kinda close (in the same zipcode) just sold for way more than we thought ours was worth, rasing the value of ours quiet a bit. Both had less land, smaller homes, no out building and fewer bedrooms, also we have the best view as we are on top of the highest hill for 10 miles.
So ours is ringing the bell over what those sold for. our goal was to walk away with no debt. (and no home. but.. ya thats a future me problem right? we do have a year round cabin in the family we will live in until the businesses are sold/closed) if this deal goes through we will be leaving MN with 200K in the bank plus what ever we sell the businesses for.
When I was flipping, I created a spreadsheet to calculate ARV (After Repair Value) which went deep into determining what it “should” sell for based off of comp sales. The trickiest part of comps is determining which were true comps. When I was in the Seattle area, you could have 2 houses, same age, same builder, same floorplan, same basic condition, but be $300K different because one had a view and the other did not. Zillow could never pick up on that.
When you read the fine print on Zillow, they pretty much admit their estimates are crap. “There is an 80% chance that the actual sale price will be within +/*20% of the Estimate”. Another way of saying the same thing is that there is a 20% chance that the actual sale price will be greater than 20% +/- of the Actual Sale Price. Zillow picks comps based on proximity with matching or similar flags (number of beds, baths, square footage, etc). My spreadsheet could use ANY other sale of a like unit (ie, SFR, Condo, etc) as a comp, because I knew what the value of an additional bedroom, or bathroom was. I had a lot of people that wanted to buy my spreadsheet, but I never sold it.
We moved from a white hot market and went 30 minutes west to a dead market. No mortgage. I retired, got bored, went back to work and going out again. Sometimes I think retirement is the worst job I ever had.