How do I know if my agent priced my house right?
Last updated August 19, 2026
You check the work, not the number. A price is a conclusion, and a conclusion you cannot trace back to closed sales is a guess. So ask to see the sales it was built on, then run the seven checks below against the presentation in your hands, before you sign anything.
You do not need a licence to do this. You need the comps in front of you and about twenty minutes.
Seven checks to run on the price you were handed
Are the comparables closed sales or active listings?
Closed sales are the only evidence of what a buyer actually paid and a lender actually funded. An active listing is an asking price. Anyone can ask anything, and a house can sit at that number for a year without a single offer. Sort the pages and count.
Every home used to build the price has a closing date and a sold price. Actives and pendings appear in a separate section, labelled as competition, not as evidence.
The list mixes sold and for sale homes together, or leans on the highest asking price on the street. Asking prices dressed up as value is the fastest way to a number nobody pays.
How recent are they, and how many are there?
A sale that closed nine months ago was negotiated ten or eleven months ago, under different rates and different inventory. Ask for the closing date on every one, not the listing date.
Three to six closed sales from the last three to six months, in your area, plus a note explaining any older sale that had to be used and why.
Two sales, or sales from last year with no explanation. A thin set is sometimes unavoidable. It should be named as thin, not presented as certainty.
Are they the same kind of house?
Go through the list one at a time and check six things against your own home: lot type, view or no view, one storey or two, bed and bath count, condition, and whether it sits on a busy street. Any of those can move a price more than square footage does.
Your agent can tell you which of those six each comp differs on, because they walked the house or watched the sale happen. They will say out loud which comps are strong and which are a stretch.
Homes picked because they are geographically close and roughly the same size. A remodelled two storey with a view and a dated single storey backing a road are not the same product, even side by side.
Were adjustments made, and were they shown to you?
This is where most listing prices go wrong. Each comp differs from your house in specific ways, so each one needs a plus or minus written next to it. A pool. A third bathroom. A finished garage. A renovated kitchen against your original one. You should be able to read every adjustment and disagree with it.
An average price per square foot across a group of different houses hides all of that. It is one number doing the work of twenty judgments, and the swing is not small.
Take a 3,000 square foot house. Price it at the Calabasas citywide figure of $658 a foot and you get $1,974,000. Price the same house at the Woodland Hills figure of $601 and you get $1,803,000. That is a $171,000 difference, and neither calculation ever looked at your house. Within a single city the spread is wider still, because a smaller home almost always carries a higher price per foot than a larger one on the same street.
A line by line grid. Comp, sold price, what it has that you do not, what you have that it does not, the dollar adjustment for each, and the adjusted value. Price per square foot appears as a sanity check at the end, not as the method.
Six sold prices, an average price per square foot, and your square footage multiplied by it. Ask where the adjustments went. If the answer is that the comps are close enough, they were not adjusted.
What does the active and pending picture look like?
Closed sales tell you what buyers paid. Actives and pendings tell you what your house is up against on the day it goes live. Both matter, and they answer different questions.
Pendings are the sharpest signal on the page. They are the most recent thing buyers agreed to, and they close weeks before they show up as a closed sale. If everything similar to your house went pending inside two weeks, the market is moving. If four homes like yours are sitting active, you are the fifth choice unless your price or your presentation says otherwise.
A count of what is active in your band right now, what went pending recently and how fast, and a plain sentence about where your house lands in that lineup.
Closed sales only, with no mention of what a buyer will see next to your listing the week it launches.
Did they give you a range, with what happens at each end?
One number with no reasoning around it is a sales pitch. A real recommendation comes as a range, with the trade you are making at each end spelled out.
At the top of the range you are asking for more time and betting on a smaller pool of buyers. At the bottom you are buying speed and competition. Both are legitimate. You should be told which one you are choosing and what it costs.
A range, a recommended list price inside it, the reason for the recommendation, and a written plan for the first three weeks. Including what you do if no offer arrives.
One number and a promise. If the plan for a quiet launch is that you can always lower it later, the price was never a plan. We wrote out what that actually costs in what happens if you overprice.
Is the number what the house is worth, or what you wanted to hear?
Ask this one out loud. It is fair, and a good agent will not flinch at it.
Pricing to win a listing is a real practice in this business, and it is the most expensive favour anyone can do you. The agent gets the sign in the yard. You get the launch window spent at a number the closed sales never supported, then a reduction, then a longer day count, then an offer below what a correct price would have brought on day one. The market does not honour a price that was set in a living room.
The tell is simple. A price built from evidence comes with the evidence. A price built to please you comes with adjectives.
The agent tells you something you did not want to hear. A comp that hurts. A repair that has to happen first. A ceiling your house cannot clear this year, and why.
Every comp supports the high end, nothing in the presentation contradicts anything you said you wanted, and the number is a little above the highest figure you had in your head.
"Show me the closed sales this number is built on, and tell me which three are the weakest." An agent who priced on evidence answers in under a minute. Get that list for your address in your home value report, and check any presentation against it.
What is a comparative market analysis?
A comparative market analysis, usually called a CMA, is the document an agent builds to recommend a list price. It gathers recent closed sales of homes similar to yours, adjusts each one up or down for the differences, and lands on a supported range.
It is not an appraisal. An appraiser is a licensed third party hired by a lender, and their report decides how much that lender will lend. A CMA is your agent's opinion of value, built the same way but written for you, before you list. It is also not an automated estimate from a website, which never entered your house and does not know what you did to the kitchen.
A complete CMA has five parts: closed sales with dates, a written adjustment for every difference, the current active and pending competition, a recommended range, and a plan for the first three weeks on market. If any of those five are missing, ask for them. Estimates of value are opinions, and no agent or algorithm can guarantee what your home will sell for.
Should I list high and come down later?
Price it where the closed sales support it and launch. The first days on market are the largest audience your listing will ever have, because every buyer with a saved search that matches your house sees it at once. That audience never rebuilds.
A stretched price spends that window teaching active buyers to skip you, and it also filters your house out of the searches of every buyer shopping just under your number. Those are the people who would have competed for it. When the reduction comes, it arrives as a signal that nobody paid the first number, so buyers wait for the next cut instead of writing an offer.
There is one honest exception, and it is about evidence rather than optimism: a property with no true comparable sale. The full breakdown, including when a higher number is a strategy instead of a hope, is in what happens if you overprice your house.
How many comparable sales should an agent show me?
Three to six closed sales from the last three to six months is a working answer for most homes in this market. Below three, one unusual sale drags the whole conclusion. Above six, the extra ones are usually less similar, and less similar comps make the number worse, not better.
The count you can get depends entirely on where you live, and the difference between cities here is enormous. In the twelve months to August 18, 2026, Woodland Hills recorded 750 closed sales and Thousand Oaks 646. Westlake Village recorded 391, Calabasas 274, Agoura Hills 216. Hidden Hills recorded 15.
Now narrow that to your house. Take Calabasas at 274 sales a year, then filter to your bed count, your square footage band, your condition and your view. You may be down to four or five genuine comparables. That is normal, and it is why a careful agent says which comps are strong and which are a stretch instead of presenting six as if they were equal.
Look up the count for your own city before your listing appointment, so you know what a realistic set looks like. We publish closed medians and price per square foot for 59 cities and zip codes, updated weekly.
What if two agents give me very different prices?
Ask both to show you the closed sales behind the figure. Nine times out of ten the gap explains itself the moment you see the two comp sets side by side, because they used different sales, or the same sales with different adjustments. Then you are not choosing between two people. You are choosing between two pieces of evidence, and you can read both.
Here is the honest limitation. Even after you do that, two careful agents can look at the same house and land meaningfully apart. Valuation is not arithmetic. It is judgment applied to incomplete evidence, and the thinner the evidence the wider the honest disagreement.
Hidden Hills is the clearest example we can give you. Fifteen homes closed there in the twelve months to August 18, 2026, at a median of $6,000,000 and $1,229 per square foot. Fifteen sales across a whole year, on large parcels, with almost no two houses alike. Filter those fifteen down to homes that genuinely resemble yours and you may be left with none. At that point the price stops being a reading of past sales and becomes a judgment about a buyer who does not exist in the market yet. Two experienced agents can differ by a wide margin on that judgment, and neither of them is being dishonest.
Compare that to Woodland Hills at 750 closed sales in the same year, a median of $1,224,000 and $601 per square foot. There, the evidence is deep enough that two careful CMAs should land close together. If they do not, one of them skipped the adjustments.
One more thing worth asking each agent: how many homes did you close last year. Across Los Angeles and Ventura counties, 51,707 homes closed in that twelve months and 30,287 agents were named on them. Of those agents, 44.2% closed exactly one transaction and 63.1% closed two or fewer. Repetition is what teaches you which comps hold up under an appraiser and which ones fall apart. Our full breakdown of who actually sells here is in our research on the archive, which now holds 104,995 closed sales.
Can I check my price myself?
Yes, and you should. Three ways, in order of effort.
- Start with the published numbers. The market reports carry closed medians and price per square foot for 59 cities and 22 zip codes, recalculated weekly. Multiply the median price per foot for your city by your square footage. That gives you a crude bracket, not a value, and its whole purpose is to tell you whether the number you were handed is in a different universe.
- Read the research. Our statistics page is built on our own archive of 104,995 closed sales, so you can see what the market actually does rather than what a portal guesses.
- Get the number built by hand. A home value report is a licensed agent pulling the closed sales for your address, making the adjustments, and sending you the comps so you can check the work yourself.
An automated estimate is a starting point and nothing more, because it has never seen the inside of your house. We took that apart in how accurate a Zestimate really is.
Tell us your address. You get your projected list price, the closed sales it stands on, all three ways to sell, and what you keep after every fee. No cost, in your inbox within 24 hours.
This is not legal advice and it is not tax advice. A comparative market analysis is an opinion of value, not an appraisal and not a guarantee of sale price. Talk to your CPA about the tax side of a sale and to your own attorney about anything you sign.
How do I know if my agent priced my house right?
Check the work behind the number. Ask to see the closed sales it was built on, how recent they are, how similar those homes are to yours, and what adjustments were made for the differences. A price you can trace back to specific closings is evidence. A price with no closed sales behind it is an opinion, however confident it sounds.
Are active listings good comparable sales?
No. An active listing is an asking price, and anyone can ask anything. Only a closed sale shows what a buyer actually paid and a lender actually funded. Active and pending listings are useful for one thing, which is seeing the competition your house faces on the day it goes live. They do not set your value.
Is price per square foot a reliable way to price a house?
Not on its own. Price per square foot moves with lot, view, condition, layout and size, and a smaller home almost always carries a higher figure per foot than a larger one nearby. A 3,000 square foot house priced at the Calabasas citywide figure of $658 a foot comes to $1,974,000. The same house at the Woodland Hills figure of $601 comes to $1,803,000. An average across a whole city never looked at your house.
Should I pick the agent who gives me the highest price?
Pick the number you can trace to closed sales. Ask each agent to show the closings behind the figure, and to tell you exactly what happens if no offer arrives in the first three weeks. A specific answer means the price was set on purpose. A price set to win the listing still has to survive buyers and an appraiser, and neither of them was in the room.
Summary points
- A list price is a conclusion. If you cannot trace it back to specific closed sales, it is a guess, no matter who says it.
- Closed sales are the only evidence of value. An active listing is an asking price, and anyone can ask anything.
- Three to six closed sales from the last three to six months is a working set for most homes here. Fewer than three and one odd sale drags the whole number.
- Every comparable needs a written dollar adjustment for how it differs from your house. A raw price per square foot average across different homes is the most common way a listing price goes wrong.
- Ask for a range with what happens at each end, plus a written plan for the first three weeks. One number and a promise is a sales pitch.
- Two careful agents can honestly land far apart where comparables are thin. Hidden Hills recorded 15 closed sales in the year to August 18, 2026, so there may be no true comparable at all.
- You can check the work yourself. Closed medians and price per square foot for 59 cities are published at /market/, and a licensed agent will build the number by hand for your address at /report/.