Run your own comps: price it right the first time

Pricing is the one job where direct sellers can genuinely beat the old process — because you can spend three focused hours on one house, yours, with the same public data everyone else uses. Underprice and you donate equity; overprice and you sit unsold while the listing goes stale. This is the method for landing in the band where homes actually sell.

Step 1 — Gather your raw comps (sold, not asking)

The single most important rule: comps are sold prices, never asking prices. Asking prices are opinions; sold prices are facts. Unsold inventory at high prices is evidence of what the market rejected.

Where to pull solds, all free:

• Zillow → search your neighborhood → filter "Recently Sold." Note price, date, beds/baths, square footage, and look at the photos.
• Redfin → same exercise; its sold pages often show final price vs. asking, which tells you how much negotiating room this market has.
• County property records — the ground truth. St. Joseph and Elkhart County (IN) property-card portals and the Berrien County (MI) equivalents show what the county recorded, plus square footage, year built, and lot size for verifying what the sites say.

Collect 5–10 sales that match yours on:

Step 2 — Anchor on price per square foot

For each comp: sold price ÷ finished square feet. Line them up. You'll usually see a cluster — say $115–$130/sqft — with an outlier or two you can explain (backs to the highway; gut-renovated). Throw out the outliers, keep the cluster.

Multiply the cluster range by your square footage. That's your raw band. On a 1,600 sqft house at $115–130/sqft: $184,000–$208,000. Everything from here is refinement.

Step 3 — Adjust for real differences

Adjust your raw band comp-by-comp, and keep adjustments modest — buyers pay for the whole house, not a parts list:

• Bathrooms and bedrooms matter more than raw square feet: a 2-bath house against 1-bath comps deserves a bump; the reverse deserves a haircut.
• Garage, basement (finished vs. not), lot size — meaningful in Michiana, where buyers expect storage and winter parking.
• Mechanicals and roof — a new roof/furnace/AC doesn't add its invoice price, but it removes a buyer's objection; old ones become negotiating targets.
• Renovations return cents on the dollar, not dollar-for-dollar. A $40,000 kitchen does not move the price $40,000. Price the house, not the receipts.
• The un-fixables — busy road, power lines, weird layout — cost more than sellers ever want to believe. If every showing will mention it, price it in first.

Step 4 — Check the market's direction before you commit

A price that was right in a rising spring market is wrong in a slowing fall one. The authorities here are the big platforms themselves — Zillow's market pages and research data, Redfin's Data Center, and the Federal Reserve's FRED series. Rely on those; our monthly report and town pages — South Bend, Mishawaka, Elkhart, Granger, Niles — simply aggregate the same sources into one convenient Michiana view, with links back to the originals:

• Days on market — Elkhart homes recently went under contract in a median 16 days; Niles took 44. Fast market: price at the top of your band. Slow: middle.
• Inventory trend — Granger inventory recently jumped 64% year over year; more competition argues for sharper pricing. South Bend inventory fell 13%; scarcity is your friend.
• Year-over-year values — if your town is up ~6% and your best comp sold five months ago, that comp is arguably a couple percent stale. Adjust forward, gently.
• Seasonality — Michiana springs and summers bring families timing school years; January brings serious-but-few buyers. Same house, different depth of demand.

Step 5 — Set the number (and the tripwire)

• Pick one price inside your adjusted band — not above it "to leave room." Buyers filter in $25K steps ($200K, $225K, $250K); price just under a step ($224,900, not $226,500) and you appear in one more set of search results.
• Overpricing is not free. The first two weeks are your listing's whole life online — every search alert fires once. A stale, re-cut listing signals weakness and often nets less than pricing right on day one.
• Underpricing is not "strategy" unless you're deliberately courting a bidding war in a fast market — and even then, only a few percent under, never ten.
• Set the tripwire before you list: plenty of clicks but no showings in two weeks → you're ~5% high. Showings but no offers → the house shows worse than the photos, or you're ~2–3% high. Decide now what you'll do then, so the data — not the discourage — makes the call.

About the "owners can't price their own homes" talking point

Intermediaries like to point out that owners misprice their homes and "often sell for less than they could get." Notice what that argument actually claims: that reading sold prices off a public website is beyond you. It isn't. Pricing is a method, not magic — the same comps, the same arithmetic, the same public data, whoever does it. The method on this page is the pricing process; the difference is you're doing it for one house you know perfectly, with your full attention.

Owners successfully sell direct every day, at prices they're happy with, using exactly this kind of homework. Do the three hours, trust the data over the doubt, and don't be afraid to sell your own home and keep your money.

The 3-hour version

1. Pull 8 sold comps from Zillow/Redfin (45 min)
2. Verify the 4 best on the county portal (30 min)
3. Compute $/sqft cluster → raw band (15 min)
4. Adjust for baths, garage, condition, un-fixables (45 min)
5. Sanity-check against the monthly report and your town page (20 min)
6. Set price just under a search step; write down your two-week tripwire (15 min)

That's the whole job — done with the same public data, and more attention than any one-of-forty listings gets. When you're ready: sell it direct.

If your situation is genuinely unusual — acreage, historic property, major damage — a licensed appraiser (a few hundred dollars, flat fee) is the direct-model answer to hard pricing questions. And if you're simply uncomfortable choosing a price, just pay for a professional appraisal — typically a few hundred dollars.