Almost every seller I meet has already looked their house up online. That is completely reasonable. The problem is that in Texas, the number they found was built without the one piece of information that actually matters.
In most states, what a house sold for becomes public record at closing. Anyone can look it up, including a valuation site, which is how those sites produce estimates that are at least arguably defensible.
Texas is one of a small number of non-disclosure states. The closing price never becomes public. Nobody outside the transaction ever sees it.
Asking prices, tax assessments, square footage, bed and bath counts, and how long things sat on the market. All real information. None of it is what somebody actually paid.
An asking price is an opinion. A tax assessment is the county’s own estimate, produced for a different purpose on a different schedule. Build a valuation on top of those and you have an educated guess stacked on two other guesses.
The assumption is always that the online number is too low. Sometimes it is — I have seen homes in Burleson and Crowley worth meaningfully more than the estimate suggested, because a whole street of recent sales was invisible to it.
But it goes the other way just as often, and that version is more expensive. A seller anchors to a number no appraisal will support, prices to it, sits for sixty days, and ends up taking less than they would have got with a correct price in the first two weeks. The market is not punishing them for being greedy. They were working from bad data.
I pull what has genuinely closed near you — same layout, same condition, recent enough to matter — and I tell you what it means. That includes telling you when the answer is that you should wait, which an automated estimate will never say, because it has nothing to lose by being wrong.
It also accounts for what no model can see: that your roof is three years old, that the house backs onto a road, that the comparable two streets over counted a garage conversion as finished square footage when it never should have been.
Want a real number for your house? Tell me about it and I will send you one, usually the same week. No obligation and no listing pitch.
Get my home’s value
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers in Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.