Home Value Estimator

You can start by entering your address into Pennymac’s Home Value Estimator tool. You’ll receive a detailed report of your home, including estimated home value and price per square foot, property specifics, a sales history of your home and nearby homes, along with the corresponding values at the times of sale. If you decide to sell your home, your real estate agent will be able to provide you with an informed estimate of how much you may be able to get from a buyer, putting into consideration your home’s special features, location and how the market is currently affecting its perceived value. If you need help finding a top local real estate agent, you can get help from Pennymac Home Connect and possibly earn a reward when you buy or sell with that agent.

One factor often quoted when thinking about how a home’s value goes up (or down) is the fundamental concept of supply and demand. In short, when there are more buyers than available homes, buyers will find themselves competing amongst one another, bringing home prices up. The size and usable space of your home and property, along with the age and condition, will also weigh heavily into its calculated market value. You may choose to invest in renovating your living space, which can increase how much a buyer is willing to pay for it. Location also plays a big role. This includes the local school district, as well as your home’s proximity to employment, entertainment and natural resources. Recent sales of comparable properties in the neighborhood will also be used when an agent calculates your home’s perceived value, which you will also find in the report on a property you search in the Home Value Estimator tool.

In what is considered a sustainable market, home values are generally expected to rise slowly and incrementally over time. When we consider the fluctuating personality of the market, one can also say that home value changes are perhaps as predictable as interest rates — we never quite know precisely what direction they will go. What you can do is keep watch on current sales and prices in your neighborhood — which the Home Value Estimator can provide. And this helpful tool is updated regularly to factor in the latest fluctuations of the market, providing you with the most accurate, up-to-date information. The key ingredient to home price trends is how much buyers are actually willing and able to pay for a home in the current market, weighing all the economic factors that go along with making that calculation.

Pennymac’s online estimator is powered by a best-in-class Real Estate Automated Valuation Model (AVM). Despite this fact, our Home Value Estimator is not a substitute for an appraisal. While most lenders do not accept AVM estimates as a replacement for a full appraisal in the loan process, there are some loan products for which lenders may use an AVM as part of the appraisal process. Keep in mind that an online tool cannot see a home’s broken pipe, condition of the floors, or any other physical matter requiring repair that could potentially decrease the calculated value of a home when selling or evaluating the property’s real value as collateral against a loan. The ranges between estimates can also vary greatly. What these tools can provide is a ballpark estimate when you’re considering selling your home, buying a new one, or taking out a mortgage for a home purchase or refinance.

Free online home valuations can be viewed as snapshots in time, pulled from a variety of different public sources and data models, which give accurate property estimates. This is very useful when monitoring your investment over time to determine how much equity you have in your home to refinance or if you are simply in the market to purchase your next home. You can compare valuations to a seller’s listing price or keep an eye on a specific neighborhood that you wish to move to in the future.

The most accurate home valuations are done by locally licensed, certified professionals. There is a charge for these and they take longer to complete, but they are able to account for a variety of different factors that can affect a specific property individually.

Please note that several factors can affect the accuracy of your estimate:

• Availability of data from public records, agents, and other sources
• Speed of systems used by individual municipalities to report sales data
• Number of transactions in any given area over a specific period of time
• Uniqueness of a property’s design and features

In some places, home sales data is limited or unavailable. Certain “non-disclosure” states don’t disclose sale prices for homes in public records. Non-disclosure states include:

• Alaska
• Idaho
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Mississippi
• Missouri (some counties)
• Montana
• New Mexico
• North Dakota
• Texas
• Utah
• Wyoming