The struggle of pulling comps in 2025

Comps aren’t easy today. The problem is there aren’t that many sales, so it’s not so simple to figure out value. Lately, I’ve been getting a ton of questions about this, so I wanted to share some things I’m doing on my end. Skim by topic or digest slowly. I’d love to hear your take in the comments.

UPCOMING SPEAKING GIGS:

3/6/25 Yolo Association YPN Event
3/12/25 Windemere Sierra Oaks
3/20/25 HomeSmart iCare Realty (private I think)
4/2/25 SAFE Credit Union (details TBA)
4/10/25 Yuba-Sutter Association (details TBA)
4/15/25 Culbertson and Gray (private I think)
4/24/25 KW EDH (private I think)
5/8/25 Private event (details TBA)
5/13/25 PCAR
6/5/25 Auburn Marketing Meeting
9/26/25 PCAR
11/4/25 SAR Main Meeting

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND ABOUT COMPS IN 2025

1) SALES TELL US ABOUT THE PAST

Closed sales are like historic artifacts that tell us what the market used to be like. In other words, sales might not reflect what buyers are willing to pay today. No, they really tell us what value used to be like when these properties got into contract a few months ago or whenever. What is the market like right now? Let’s look to the pendings and listings to understand the temperature today. It’s the pendings and listings where we can sometimes get clues as to whether prices are rising, flat, or declining. This doesn’t mean sales aren’t significant. They are. All I’m saying is we need to give way more respect to current data. Just be sure to look for a pattern. You don’t want to hang your perception of value on only one or two listings.

2) TWO OPTIONS TODAY

We have two choices for comps. Go back further in time in the immediate neighborhood, or go out further to competitive areas. Why not do both? I think the knee-jerk response is to search for more recent sales further away, but don’t sleep on using older sales in the immediate neighborhood and figuring out how the market has changed since those properties got into contract. The danger of going too far out is some neighborhoods are really dissimilar and not comparable. And you know, buyers might not be shopping in both areas at the same time, so it gets super awkward to be arbitrarily pulling “comps” two miles away in the same ZIP code. That’s not the move.

3) HOW FAR AWAY CAN YOU GO FOR COMPS?

It’s not how far you can go, but where you should go. Read that again. This is true in any market. And where would buyers go for comps? That’s also a viable question. No matter where you’re getting comps, be sure they are a good substitution. In other words, if a buyer wasn’t going to purchase the subject, would the buyer really consider the comps you’re using? In short, there isn’t a distance parameter. In a rural market, you might be going many miles away, but in an urban market you could be focused on a very tight area. One more thing. Don’t just automatically go out further to find the “comps” that meet the price or value you want.

These days I find myself spending much more time researching nearby neighborhoods. I’ll draw boundaries around the subject neighborhood (polygon MLS tool), and then draw boundaries around other areas too. There simply aren’t many sales, so I’m looking at a wider portion of the market to try to make sense of things. Keep in mind I may not be using nearby neighborhood sales as “comps,” but it could be helpful research to get a sense of where the market is at.

4) HOW OLD CAN THE COMPS BE?

Don’t get stuck on just using sales over the past 90 days. The problem today is we’re missing a huge portion of the market, so we don’t have the luxury of many recent sales. Keep in mind closed sales volume was down 34% last year in the region, and that means there were 34% fewer comps to choose from. No wonder why it hasn’t been easy!!! On that note, you might have a comp that is much older (a year or two), and you may need to use that today after figuring out how the market has changed since that property sold. There is NOTHING wrong with that. We simply need to do our best in the midst of limited data. But you don’t want to cherry-pick a really high sale from the past while glossing over newer sales that are lower. My advice? Use some older comps if necessary, some newer ones, and maybe some comps from competitive neighborhoods too. Keep in mind FHA wants comps within twelve months though. And it is possible lenders might want more recent comps too (hopefully they exist).

5) LOOK AT THE MARKET IN CHUNKS

I tend to look at the market in annual chunks. So, if I’m searching for comps, I might draw boundaries around an area in MLS using the map search and maybe look at 1500-1900 SQ FT sales from 2024 and beyond. Then I’ll look at just 2023. Then 2022. And then 2021. And maybe I’ll keep going back further if needed. I could even draw boundaries around competitive areas to see if the comps were selling at similar prices historically too. I know this sounds crazy and tedious, but this helps me understand how prices have changed over time. Very often I can see a market that went up through mid-2022, dipped, rebounded, and now feels flat. The problem is if we don’t go back far enough, we don’t often glean enough context for how values have changed. And remember, you might not use really old sales as comps, but you can use them for research. If you’re a real estate agent, the huge benefit here is going to a listing presentation well-versed in the neighborhood trend, but also being in tune with properties that sold three years ago that your client thinks sold six months ago.

6) UNDERSTAND THE SHAPE

One helpful thing as we look for comps is to understand the shape of the neighborhood. In other words, how have prices moved over time? This will help us make adjustments or realize there is no adjustment needed since the market is at a similar place today. For me, I like making graphs to see this. If you have a different way to do that, cool. What I’m seeing in many cases in my graphs is a flattening in recent time especially. One thing to keep in mind though is graphs like this are based on closed sales, so it might take a few months for the trend happening in the pendings and listings to show up in the sales.

Secondly, it helps to be in tune with county and regional trends. All I’m saying is the trend I’m seeing in the county is often pretty similar to what I see in neighborhoods. We saw massive price growth through mid-2022, a dip, modest appreciation, and now a pretty flat market. However, the luxury market isn’t always following this pattern as there is more strength there. So, not every portion of the market will rigidly follow the median price in the county, for instance. This is where we have to listen to competitive data. Know what I’m saying?

7) LOOK FOR REPEAT SALES

This might seem random, but one thing I’m doing today more often is looking for repeat sales in MLS. If I can line up a few examples of sales that sold a couple of times in recent years (in the same condition), there are sometimes clues as to where the market is at today. The danger is maybe the property sold too high or low in the past or today, so we have to be super careful here. And this is where we want to line up multiple examples to try to see a pattern. The goal here is to understand the shape of the market because that might help us as we’re pulling comps and sometimes trying to adjust older sales.

TIP: Use the MLS map search and have a few years of data in the parameters. If you see more than one pin on a property, that’s your sign there is a resale situation. You’ll have to look at pictures to understand condition, and there may be some legwork in understanding each transaction. I don’t put all my weight on this method. It’s just one tool in my bag of tricks. It can be really helpful in a declining market though where we see properties selling for less.

Here is an example in the Land Park neighborhood from this week. I’m a bit hesitant to share this since resale examples were a bit all over the place, but I guess this is a good real-life situation where it doesn’t always look perfect like it might in a real estate text book. Remember, we don’t want to pin the trend on just one example either. And sometimes we get conflicting results, so we’re going to have to try to make sense out of it all.

Here’s a different example in the Verdera neighborhood in Lincoln where I was focused on a luxury price point (value was above $2M, but it sold for significantly less a decade ago). What I wanted to do was find out how much prices have changed over many years, so I looked at recent sales and traced back their previous purchase. This ended up being really helpful to justify a hefty change. But some units might have been remodeled, had a pool installed, and I think one even bought the lot next door and then re-sold twice as large. Ultimately, we are in charge and have to decide which examples are reflective of the market trend or outliers. So, you decide if it’s useful or junk.

8) TAKE MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES

In my opinion, there is no such thing as pulling comps in just five minutes. The truth is it could be hours of pouring through data to try to figure out value. My advice? Maybe do some of the stuff above or other methods you find useful. No matter what, we need a multi-layered approach to try to see the market in different ways. Recent sales, older sales, nearby neighborhoods, competitive areas further away, ZIP code trends, county trends, current listings and pendings, make some graphs, word on the street from the real estate community, etc…

I suspect some people are going to be using ChatGPT more to choose comps and such, so maybe you could get results in seconds. But be careful with that.

9) LISTEN TO THE DATA

We have to block out voices when choosing comps. What do the stats tell you? Is the market flat? Are prices going down? Is there a modest spring uptick happening? What do we see in the data? This is where we have to really look to the comps and let them speak to us. The truth is the answer could be different by neighborhood and price point, so we have to resist imposing the same trend on every neighborhood. For instance, the condo market has some struggles right now, but that trend may not be showing up at luxury price points. If you confused too, talk to others about what they’re seeing. Ask for help. Hone your skills.

10) THERE ISN’T JUST ONE WAY

There isn’t just one way to do this, so figure out what works for you. But keep growing and picking up tips. The reality is when the market changes, we often have to add new tricks to our bag. In the past, comps were ample, but that’s not the vibe today, so we need to approach things differently.

Thanks for being here.

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Questions: What stands out to you the most above? What else are you doing today to pull comps? What did I miss?

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