Every offer that wins, and every offer that loses, comes down to one question: what have similar homes nearby actually sold for, recently? That is what a 'comp' — short for comparable sale — measures. Estimates are interesting. Comps are decisive.
What a comp actually is
A comp is a closed sale of a similar home, in a similar location, in a recent window of time. Appraisers use comps. Lenders underwrite from comps. Listing agents price homes off comps. The reason is simple: a comp isn't a prediction. It's evidence. Someone with a checkbook decided what a real home was worth, and a closing actually happened.
A useful comp shares four traits with the subject home:
- Proximity — same neighborhood, ideally within half a mile, ideally on a similar street type.
- Similarity — comparable square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, lot size, and era of construction.
- Recency — sold in roughly the last 90 days. Older sales reflect a different market.
- Condition match — remodeled homes are comps for remodeled homes; original-condition homes are comps for original-condition homes.
Why comps beat any single estimate
Automated valuations — the Zestimate, Redfin Estimate, and the rest — are models trained on past sales. They're useful as a sanity check, but they smooth over the things that actually move price: condition, view, layout quirks, school catchment, micro-location. A good comp captures those things implicitly, because the buyer who wrote the winning offer already weighed them.
Put differently: an estimate tells you what an algorithm thinks the home is worth. A comp tells you what a real human paid for a real home down the street, last month. When the two disagree, the comp wins.
Where comp analysis usually goes wrong
- Cherry-picking. Listing agents tend to surface the comps that support their list price. Buyer agents sometimes do the reverse.
- Stale data. A comp from nine months ago in a market that has moved 5% is not a comp anymore.
- Apples-to-oranges. A 2,000-square-foot remodeled home is not a comp for a 2,000-square-foot original-condition home, even on the same block.
- Ignoring active and pending listings. Closed sales tell you the past. Actives and pendings tell you what the market is doing right now.
How Zeego's comp analysis works
Zeego pulls the underlying comp set on every property from the same data sources lenders and appraisers rely on, then presents it cleanly so you can see what the numbers are actually built on:
- Recent closed sales near the property, with sale price, date, beds, baths, square footage, and distance.
- Active and pending listings nearby, so you can see where the market is heading, not just where it's been.
- Side-by-side comparison to the subject home, so mismatches in size, era, or condition are obvious.
- The blended Zeego estimate (an average of Zestimate, Redfin, CoreLogic, and Quantarium) shown alongside the comps — so you can see when the model and the market agree, and when they don't.
The point isn't to replace your judgment. It's to put the same evidence in front of you that a good agent would, in about a minute, without anyone steering which comps you see.
How to actually use comps when writing an offer
- Anchor on the three or four closest, most recent, most similar closed sales. Ignore outliers in either direction.
- Adjust for obvious differences — a remodeled kitchen, a finished basement, a bigger lot — but don't overthink it. Appraisers typically adjust in the low single-digit percents per feature.
- Look at active and pending listings to gauge momentum. If pendings are closing above list, the market is moving up under you.
- Compare your conclusion to the blended estimate. If they're close, you're on solid ground. If they're far apart, the home is hard to value and the comps win.
An offer priced off real comps, with eyes open about condition and momentum, is the offer that wins without overpaying. Everything else — the Zestimate, the seller's wishful pricing, the agent's gut feel — is a starting point. Comps are the answer.