House Values by Address

Whether you want to sell your house in the near future or just want to keep a running tab of the real estate market in your city or area, it's easy to research home prices for yourself. Use the Internet to do most of the work for you and within an hour, you can have the start of a running tab of your own housing market forecast.

When you track home prices, you're in control of the exact information you want to find. Maybe all you care about are house price trends by zip code or maybe you're interested in house sold prices in my street. Whatever the parameters, by doing your own simple real estate market research, you will get the data you want.

Think about what real estate information you want and jot down a few notes.

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If you have a real estate Web site you already like, great. Use it. If you don't know much about researching house values by address, here are a few online real estate sites that offer plenty of information:

- Real Estate
- Realtor
- Trulia
- Zillow

Take a look at them to get a feel for how they navigate and choose one of these Web sites that you enjoy using.

Make your house pricing spreadsheet the way you want it so you can monitor house prices. If you're familiar with Microsoft Excel, use it to track the real estate market. If you're like me, I'd rather use a notebook and pen. Either way, here are some parameters to get you started with your own house value estimator.

This example is how I set up my real estate tracker to monitor house values by address to see how similar properties to mine are fairing in this economy:

1. In the first column, type or write "Address" for the address of the home.

2. In the next column, enter "Bed/Bath" to indicate the number of bedrooms/number of bathrooms in the home you're monitoring.

3. In the third column, enter "Date/$" for the date you check on the home at this address and the sale price the house on that date.

4. In the next several column, enter "Date/$" again. Repeat this as many times as you want. If you want to track homes in your area for six months total and check on their status once a month, you'll need six columns for each date you check the status. Adjust this according to your needs.

Remember that to accurately monitor home pricing in your area, the listing prices over time as well as the house sold prices are helpful in using this tracking tool as a house value estimator tool.

5. In the last column, enter "Sold Date/$" for the date the house sold and house sold price.

This chart is dynamic, meaning you can adjust the columns and data to track as needed. Add more specific information like "Garage," "Pool," or "Foreclosure/Short Sale," or any other parameters you want to include in your tracking, if desired.

To use the house value estimator, you'll need to populate it with data. I like to start close to home so I often input my zip code in the online real estate site. Then I narrow it down to my neighborhood using the map feature to zoom in close to home.

Next, I look at specific streets then house values by address to hone in on exactly what real estate I want to track. Some Web sites will remove a listing entirely if it's been up for a long time--many months or a year or more--then they relist it at a "new" (read lower) price. The days on the market will change from an unsightly 420 to 2 days on the market! Poof. The magic of real estate. As you check the different house for sale listings, you'll come up with ideas of what is important to you and change your chart accordingly.

Tracking house sold prices is the ultimate piece of information you can gather about the real estate market. You can look at how much houses are listed for sale till the cows come home, but the bottom line is the sale price of houses.

When a house sells, it is removed from the MLS (multiple listing service) and will be gone from the Web site. Don't panic. After a month or two, the house sold prices are added to the roster and you can find these sale prices by searching "Recently Sold" or whatever search tab your particular real estate Web site uses to list sold properties.

At this point, when you find a house in your area that you've been monitoring, you can add the sold price and date to your chart. Each time a house sells, you gather a little more information about the real estate climate in your neighborhood.