Real Estate Comps: How To Find Comparable Sales (2026)

Written by

Alex Martinez — Founder & CEO, Real Estate Skills. Has wholesaled and flipped houses for over a decade, personally acquiring 33+ residential investment properties, and runs comps on properties nationwide.

RZ

Reviewed by

Ryan Zomorodi — Co-Founder & COO, Real Estate Skills. Reviewed and verified the comp criteria, valuation methods, and appraiser guidance in this guide before publication.

✓ Updated July 2026 ✓ Fact-Checked 📄 Free Comp Criteria Cheatsheet Watch on YouTube

Publication history: Originally published January 12, 2019. Updated July 2026 with an answer-first definition, a step-by-step process for running comps, a how-to-adjust-like-an-appraiser section, current guidance on finding comps free without a realtor, the Real Estate Skills Comp Criteria, and an updated FAQ. Comp criteria and valuation methods verified by Ryan Zomorodi, Co-Founder & COO of Real Estate Skills.

Ask any investor "is this a good deal?" and the first thing out of their mouth is "let's look at the comps." Not the listing photos, not the seller's asking price — the comps. Comparable sales are the closest thing real estate has to a straight answer on what a property is actually worth, because they're built on what real buyers have actually paid, not what someone hopes to get.

Here's the part most beginners miss: a comp is a data point, not a verdict. Three comps give you facts; what you do with those facts — how you weigh them, adjust them, and read the neighborhood around them — is the skill. Get good at it and you can walk into any property and know, within a few thousand dollars, where it lands. Get it wrong and you can talk yourself into a deal that loses money for months.

That skill is what this guide teaches — the same comp criteria we've used for over a decade to wholesale and flip houses across the country, broken down for someone starting from zero. You'll learn what makes a comp good, how to pull them free without a realtor, how to adjust them like an appraiser, and what to do when you can't find any. Follow along with the free cheatsheet — download the Real Estate Skills Comp Criteria here — and you'll have the whole method on one page.

Real Estate Comparables 101 | How To Run Comps On ANY Property!

Alex Martinez and Ryan Zomorodi walk through the entire comping process — what makes a comp good, where to pull them, and how to turn them into a value you can stand behind.

 

What Are Real Estate Comps?

The word does a lot of work, so let's be precise. A comp is a sale — a property that actually closed, where a real buyer and a real seller agreed on a number and money changed hands. That's the whole reason comps are trustworthy: they're not opinions or wishes, they're proof of what someone paid. An active listing at $500,000 tells you what a seller wants. A sold comp at $450,000 tells you what the market gave. Only one of those is real, and it's the sold one.

To be useful, a comp has to actually resemble your property. Picture two houses on the same street: both three-bed, two-bath, both around 1,200 square feet, both updated in the last few years. One just sold for $410,000. That sale is a strong signal for what the other one is worth. Now swap in a 3,000-square-foot new build, or a one-bedroom condo, or a house two neighborhoods over — the signal falls apart. Same idea, different fruit. You're always hunting for the closest match you can find, and the closer it is, the more weight it carries.

Here's the mental shift that separates people who are good at this from people who guess: a comp is a data point, not a verdict. One sale is a fact. Your job is to gather a handful of those facts and use them to form an opinion of value — because that's all a valuation ever is, an informed opinion. Ask three appraisers what a house is worth and you might get three different numbers. That's not a flaw in the process; it's the nature of it. Comps give you the facts. Reading them well is the skill, and it's a skill you can learn.

For an investor, that opinion of value has a specific name and a specific job. When you're fixing and flipping — or wholesaling a deal to someone who will — the number you're really after is the After-Repair Value (ARV): what the property will sell for once it's fully renovated. Comps are how you find it. You look at what renovated homes like yours have sold for recently, and that tells you the ceiling. Everything else in a deal — what to offer, what to spend on repairs, what you can make — reverse-engineers from that one number. Which is exactly why getting your comps right matters so much.

Why Comps Matter (And What They Can't Tell You)

Strip away the jargon and comps do one thing: they turn "I think it's worth about this much" into "here's what three similar houses actually sold for last month." That shift — from opinion to evidence — is why every serious player in a transaction leans on them. A seller uses comps to land on a list price that draws offers instead of sitting on the market. A buyer uses them to avoid overpaying and to make a case when a home's priced too high. An investor uses them to know, before spending a dollar, whether a deal has enough room to be worth doing.

For anyone buying to renovate and resell, comps carry even more weight, because they're how you see into the future. You're not pricing the house as it sits — you're pricing what it'll be worth once it's fixed up. The only honest way to project that is to look at what already-renovated homes nearby have sold for. Those sales are the ceiling. They tell you what the market will pay for the finished product, which is the number your entire deal has to work backward from.

Where Comps Fall Short

Here's the part a lot of guides won't tell you, and it matters: comps are a rearview mirror. They describe what already happened, and they're only as good as how closely they match your property and how recently they sold. A few things they genuinely can't capture on their own:

• Condition and updates. A sold price doesn't know whether that house had a gut renovation or hadn't been touched since 1985. Two identical floor plans can sell $60,000 apart on condition alone, and the raw comp won't tell you which one you're looking at — you have to check.
• The quirks. Comps miss what a spreadsheet can't see: the house backing onto a freeway, the power lines over the yard, the cul-de-sac lot everyone wants. These move value in both directions and never show up in a price-per-square-foot average.
• Where the market's going. A comp from four months ago reflects four-month-old conditions. If rates moved or inventory piled up since, that number's already a little stale. Comps tell you where the market was, not where it's heading.
• Thin data. In a rural area or a neighborhood where almost nothing sells, you may not have enough recent, similar sales to draw a confident line at all. Fewer comps means a shakier estimate — and sometimes it's a sign to walk away from the deal entirely.

None of this makes comps unreliable. It makes them a starting point that needs judgment on top. The number you pull from the data is where the work begins, not where it ends — and the rest of this guide is about the judgment that turns a pile of sold prices into a value you can actually stand behind.

Who Uses Real Estate Comps?

Comps aren't an investor tool or an agent tool — anyone who needs to know what a property is worth ends up using them. Five groups lean on them hardest:

• Buyers use comps to keep from overpaying. Before you make an offer, comps tell you whether the asking price is fair or a reach — and if it's a reach, they give you the ammunition to offer less and back it up with real sales.
• Sellers use comps to price the home right. List too high and it sits; list too low and you leave money on the table. Comps point you to the number that pulls in offers without underselling. FSBO sellers — for sale by owner, meaning no agent — rely on them even harder, since there's no agent running the numbers for them.
• Real estate agents pull comps to build a CMA, or comparative market analysis — the report an agent puts together to recommend a list price or an offer. It's comps, organized and interpreted, usually done free for their clients.
• Appraisers use comps to assign a home its official value, most often because a lender won't fund a mortgage until the property appraises for at least the purchase price. Their method — pull a few close sales, adjust for the differences, land on a number — is the exact approach this guide teaches you to run yourself.
• Investors use comps to decide whether a deal works at all. Wholesalers and flippers use them to find the After-Repair Value, back out repair costs and their margin, and figure out the highest price they can pay and still profit. No comps, no confident offer.

The through-line: everyone's asking the same question — what's this property really worth? — and comps are how each of them answers it. The appraiser just does it most formally, which is why "think like an appraiser" is the mindset worth borrowing. More on that shortly.

Where To Find Real Estate Comps (Free & Without A Realtor)

Let's kill the biggest myth first: you do not need a real estate agent, a license, or a paid subscription to find comps. Agents have the cleanest data, but the same sold sales are sitting on free websites and in public records, and for most people that's more than enough. Here's where to look, ranked the way we actually use them.

1. The MLS (Best Data, And You Can Get In Without A License)

The MLS (Multiple Listing Service) is the database agents use — every listed and sold property in a market, with the most complete, most current data there is. It's the gold standard because it shows confirmed sold prices, full property details, and listing photos. Access normally requires a license, but there are legitimate ways for investors to get in without one, including MLS assistant access under a broker. If you can pull comps directly on the MLS, do it — nothing else is as complete. We cover the ways to get MLS access even without a license in a separate guide.

2. Redfin (The Best Free Option)

If you're not on the MLS, Redfin is the closest thing to it. It pulls from the MLS and shows roughly 95% of the same information — sold prices, sale dates, photos, property details — for free. Search the address, filter to recently sold homes, and you've got most of what an agent would hand you. Zillow and Realtor.com do the same job and are worth cross-checking, since a comp that's missing on one site sometimes shows up on another.

3. County Records (The Actual, Legal Sale Price)

When a house sells, the deed gets recorded with the county, and that record is public. It's not an estimate — it's the real number someone paid, straight from the source. Search "[your county] property appraiser" or "[your county] tax assessor" and you can look up recorded sales in your area. This is the most authoritative price data there is, and it's completely free. It won't have listing photos or condition notes, so it works best alongside a site like Redfin, not instead of it.

4. A Title Company (An Underused Source)

If you build a relationship with a title officer, they can pull recent comps and title records for you. It's not where a beginner starts, but it's a genuinely good resource once you're doing real volume.

5. Paid Investor Software (When Free Isn't Enough)

In some markets the free sites don't have good coverage, or you're analyzing so many properties that you want a faster tool. That's when paid platforms like PropStream or Privy earn their keep. They're not necessary to start — plenty of full deals get done on free data — but they save time at scale. We compare the options in our guide to the best real estate comps software.

6. Google Street View (The Tool That Pays For Itself)

Before you trust any comp, walk the street on Google Maps. You'll spot things a listing never mentions — the comp that backs onto a freeway, the boarded-up house next door, the power lines over the yard. For virtual or out-of-state deals, this is how you get a feel for a neighborhood without flying there. It costs nothing and it catches expensive mistakes.

How To Run Comps On A House: 5 Steps

Running comps sounds technical, but it's five steps and you can do the whole thing free from your couch. The goal at the end is a defensible number — a value you can explain and stand behind, not a guess. Here's the process.

Step 1: Write Down Your Property's Details

Start with the home you're valuing (the "subject property"). Note the essentials: square footage, bed and bath count, lot size, year built, property type, and condition. Then the location specifics that move value — school district, the street it's on, proximity to amenities or nuisances. This is your matching profile. Everything in the next steps is about finding sales that line up with this list.

Step 2: Pull Recently Sold Homes Nearby

On the MLS, Redfin, Zillow, or Realtor.com, search the address and filter to sold homes — not active, not pending. This is the step people rush, and it's the one that matters most. Active listings show what sellers are asking; only sold homes show what buyers actually paid. A house listed at $500,000 that never sells tells you nothing. A house down the street that sold for $450,000 last month tells you everything. Set your radius tight (a half-mile is a good default) and your date range recent (the last six months). Match the property type exactly — houses to houses, condos to condos.

Step 3: Filter Down To The Closest 3–5 Comps

You'll get a list; now narrow it to the ones that genuinely resemble your property. Aim for three to five strong comps — that's what an appraiser uses, and it's enough to spot a reliable pattern without drowning in data. One comp is a coin flip; three to five is a trend. Toss anything that's the wrong size, wrong layout, or across a major road that changes the neighborhood. Quality beats quantity every time.

Step 4: Look Past The Numbers At Each Comp

Open each remaining comp and actually study it. Read the listing photos — was it renovated, or lived-in and dated? Pull up Google Street View and walk the block. Two homes with identical stats can be worlds apart if one's on a quiet cul-de-sac and the other backs onto a highway. This is where you separate a comp that truly matches from one that just looks similar on a spreadsheet. When you're valuing a renovated resale, lean hardest on comps that were themselves recently renovated — those show the ceiling.

Step 5: Crunch The Numbers With Price Per Square Foot

Now turn your comps into an estimate. The cleanest method is price per square foot (PPSF):

• Divide each comp's sold price by its square footage to get that comp's PPSF.
• Average the PPSF across all your comps.
• Multiply that average by your subject property's square footage.

Starting estimate is the key phrase: PPSF gets you in the ballpark, but no two houses are identical, so the last move is to adjust for the differences between your comps and your property. That's the step that turns a ballpark into a real number — and it's next.

How To Make Adjustments (Think Like An Appraiser)

Price per square foot gets you close. Adjustments get you right. And this is the step almost every beginner skips — which is exactly why learning it puts you ahead of most people running comps.

Here's the whole idea in one move: you never find a perfect match, so you correct for the differences. A comp has a pool and your house doesn't? The comp sold for more partly because of that pool, so you knock that value off the comp's price before you use it. A comp has one fewer bathroom than yours? Add value to that comp's price to bring it in line. You're nudging each comp toward an apples-to-apples comparison with your property — adjusting the comp, not your estimate. Do it to every comp, then average the adjusted prices. That average is your real value.

This is precisely what an appraiser does, and it's worth understanding why that matters. When someone buys your renovated flip with a mortgage, their lender orders an appraisal, and the loan only goes through if the house appraises for at least the purchase price. Miss that number and the deal can fall apart or get renegotiated down. So the appraiser's opinion effectively sets your resale value — which means the closer you can think like one, the more accurate your own numbers will be. The method appraisers use is called the sales comparison approach: pull three to five recent sales, adjust each for the differences, land on a value. That's the same method you just learned. You're doing a lightweight appraisal.

What Appraisers Actually Adjust For

Every difference between a comp and your property carries a dollar value. The common ones:

The exact dollar amounts vary by market — a pool that adds $30,000 in one metro adds nothing in another — so the amounts come from your local sold data, not a national chart. What travels everywhere is the discipline: name every difference, assign it a value, correct for it.

Now the honest part, because this is where the "think like an appraiser" frame earns its keep: adjustments are part science, part art. The science is the math above. The art is judgment — how much a specific view is really worth in a specific neighborhood, whether a slightly odd floor plan will scare buyers, how a market feels heading into winter versus spring. Appraisers make these calls, and so will you. You won't nail it every time. The goal isn't a perfect number; it's a defensible one, landing within a few thousand dollars, that you can explain to a cash buyer or a lender and back up with the sales. Get the facts, make your adjustments, and stop there — chasing a flawless answer is how people burn three hours on a single property and still guess.

One rule that keeps you out of trouble: never adjust your way to a number the comps don't support. If every sold comp says the finished house is worth $500,000, don't talk yourself into $550,000 because you think the market's heating up or your renovation will be nicer. Appraisers don't add value on optimism, and neither should you. We call it "breaking the comp," and it's the fastest way to look like an amateur to a cash buyer — or to lose money on your own deal. Conservative estimates are the ones that keep you profitable.

This section explains general valuation practices for educational purposes — it isn't financial, appraisal, or investment advice. Property values and adjustment amounts vary by market and change over time. Consult a licensed appraiser or real estate professional before relying on a valuation for a purchase, sale, or loan.

What Makes A Good Comp: The Real Estate Skills Comp Criteria

Not every recent sale nearby is a usable comp. Over more than a decade of wholesaling and flipping, we've boiled "what makes a comp good" down to a criteria we run on every single property. Meet these and you've got a comp worth trusting; miss them and you're comparing things that don't belong together.

Think of it like matching fruit. Your subject property is a red apple. A model-match down the street — same beds, baths, size, style — is another red apple, the perfect comp. More often you'll find a pink apple or a green apple: close, similar, usable with a little adjustment. What you can't do is comp a red apple against an orange, or worse, a grapefruit. A single-family house is not a condo is not a mobile home. The moment the property type changes, you're comparing different fruit — different buyers, different financing, different value — and the comparison breaks.

A few of these deserve a closer look, because they're the ones people get wrong.

• Sold within six months — and think a step ahead. Recent sales reflect the current market; old ones reflect a market that may be gone. If you use a six-month-old comp and it takes four months to renovate and resell, that comp is ten months old by closing — too stale for the next appraiser to accept. The fresher, the better.
• Within a half-mile — and don't cross the hard lines. Values change street to street. Just as important, don't let comps cross a major road, highway, or set of train tracks; neighborhoods can flip character on the other side of them.
• Within 20% of the square footage. For a 1,200-square-foot house, that's roughly 1,000 to 1,400 square feet. Don't comp it against a 600-square-foot bungalow or a 3,000-square-foot house — the price-per-square-foot math falls apart.
• Sold and renovated — the best comps of all. For finding a renovated resale value, the gold-standard comp is a recent flip: a distressed house someone bought, renovated, and resold. It shows the ceiling of value in that neighborhood and what buyers pay for a finished product. Distressed, lived-in comps with clothes on the floor won't tell you that.

Same City And Zip Code, Ideally The Same Neighborhood

This one sits underneath all the others and quietly wrecks more valuations than any single number. Cross a zip-code line and you can cross into a different school district, a different community, sometimes a different set of rules — and the value shifts with it. Appraisers don't pull comps from other zip codes, and you shouldn't either. When someone brings us comps and the zip codes don't match the subject property, that's the first red flag we check.

On The Radius: A Fair Word

You'll see other guides say a mile, or even up to five miles in less dense areas. They're not wrong for their context. A half-mile is our default because it's tight enough to hold neighborhood quality constant in a normal suburban or urban market. But in a rural area where houses are spread thin, you may have to widen it — and that's fine, as long as the neighborhood stays genuinely comparable. The radius is a tool, not a law. The principle underneath it — keep the location as similar as possible — never changes. When you genuinely can't find comps inside these rules, there's a specific way to loosen them, which we'll walk through in a moment.

A Worked Example, Start To Finish

Let's run the whole process on one property so you can see how the pieces fit. Say you're looking at a 1,200-square-foot, 3-bed/2-bath single-family house, and you want to know its After-Repair Value — what it'll sell for once it's fully renovated — so you can decide what to pay for it.

Set your search criteria. Open the MLS or Redfin, type in the address, and draw a half-mile radius around it. Then filter down using the comp criteria:

• Sold in the last six months
• Single-family houses only (same type)
• Between 1,000 and 1,400 square feet (within 20% of 1,200)
• 3-bed/2-bath, to match

That filter does the heavy lifting — it strips the map down to only the sales that actually resemble your property.

Find your renovated comps. Because you're after a renovated resale value, you want comps that were themselves recently renovated — ideally flips. Say two turn up on the same street:

From there, an investor works backward — subtract renovation costs, subtract the profit margin (and a wholesale fee, if you're wholesaling) — to find the highest price you could pay and still come out ahead.

That's the entire method in one property: match on the criteria, pull recent renovated comps, average them, and you've got a value you can defend. In a real deal you'd fine-tune it with the adjustments from earlier — nudging for the slightly larger comp, for condition differences, for anything the raw prices miss — but the backbone is exactly this. Once you've done it a dozen times, a comp run like this takes ten or fifteen minutes, and you'll trust the number at the end of it.

Figures above are illustrative examples for teaching the method. Actual values, comps, and outcomes vary by market and property.

Free Comp Criteria Cheatsheet

Get The Comp Criteria On One Page (Free)

Pulling comps gets a lot easier when the whole method fits on a single sheet. Our Comp Criteria Cheatsheet lays out the exact rules — the radius, the timeframe, the size and bed/bath match, and how to turn your comps into a value — so you can run any property with confidence instead of second-guessing the number. Download it free and keep it beside you on your next comp run.

What If You Can't Find Comps?

Sometimes you run the criteria and come up empty. Before you force it, work through this — in order. Most of the time you'll find what you need a step or two in.

First, Dig Deeper Where You Already Are

Don't assume there's nothing just because Redfin came up short. A comp missing on one site often shows up on another, so check Zillow, Realtor.com, and the county records too. Investor tools like PropStream or Privy can surface sales the consumer sites miss. Exhaust your sources before you loosen your standards — the comp you need may already be there.

Then Loosen The Criteria, One Notch At A Time

If a thorough search still comes up short, relax the rules in this order, and only as far as you have to:

• Widen the radius from a half-mile to about three-quarters of a mile — as long as the neighborhood stays genuinely comparable.
• Go back further in time — from six months to nine, or even up to a year or two in a low-volume area. But the further back you reach, the more you discount that comp, because the market has moved since.
• Loosen the size band from +/-20% to +/-25 to 30% of your square footage.
• Flex the bed/bath count, up or down, and adjust for the difference.

Loosen gently. Every step you take away from a tight match makes the comp a weaker signal, so stop as soon as you've got something usable, and lean on price per square foot to pull value from the looser sales you do find.

And Know When The Answer Is "Walk Away"

Here's the part that saves you the most time and money: if you loosen everything and still nothing has sold in the area, that's not a puzzle to solve — it's information. No sold comps usually means no activity, and no activity is a real problem. Your cash buyer is going to look at those same empty results and pass, because if nothing's trading, how does anyone know what the finished house is worth or that it'll sell at all?

We've watched people — ourselves included, early on — sink hours, sometimes dozens of hours, into a property with no comps, romanticizing it, waiting for an imaginary sale to appear, trying to justify it with active listings. It almost never works. The discipline that separates profitable investors from busy ones is knowing when to quit a deal. There's always another property around the corner with clean comps you can run in fifteen minutes. Sometimes the best deal you do is the one you walk away from — because you can always make more money, but you can't make more time.

Common Mistakes That Wreck Your Comps

Most bad valuations don't come from bad math — they come from a handful of avoidable mistakes. Here are the ones we see most, and the two real deals that taught us how expensive they get.

Mistake 1: Using Active Listings Instead Of Sold Sales

This is the most common one, and it's the easiest to fix: only sold comps count. A house listed at $500,000 that's been sitting for 90 days isn't worth $500,000 — it's worth whatever it eventually sells for, which might be far less. Active and pending listings are useful for reading the competition, but you never set your value off an asking price. A willing buyer and a willing seller closing a deal is the only thing that proves what a property is actually worth.

Mistake 2: Comparing Different Property Types

A single-family house is not a condo is not a mobile home is not a fourplex. Different types mean different buyers, different financing, and different values — so a comp from the wrong category tells you nothing, no matter how close it is otherwise. Match the type first, every time.

Mistake 3: Trusting An Automated Estimate As The Answer

We covered the automated-valuation error rates earlier; the mistake here is treating that number as a value instead of a starting point. An algorithm can't see condition, updates, or the specific block a house sits on. Use it to orient, then pull real sold comps.

Mistake 4: Pulling Comps From The Wrong Neighborhood

This is the one that costs people the most, because the two houses can look identical on paper and be worlds apart in value.

Mistake 5: Breaking The Comp

The last one is talking yourself past the data — deciding the finished house is worth $550,000 when every sold comp says $500,000, because you think the market's climbing or your renovation will be nicer. Appraisers don't add value on optimism, and the appraiser's number is the one that decides whether your buyer's loan closes. Which is exactly why it pays to understand how much an opinion of value can swing:

The thread running through all five: comps reward discipline and punish shortcuts. Match the type, use sold sales, stay in the neighborhood, verify with your own eyes, and never price above what the data supports. Do that and your numbers will hold up — to a cash buyer, to a lender, and to the market when it's time to sell.

Real Estate Comps FAQs

Final Thoughts On Real Estate Comps

Comps come down to one skill: turning a pile of sold prices into a number you can trust. Everything in this guide serves that — match the property type, use sold sales inside a tight radius and a recent window, keep them in the same neighborhood, adjust for the differences, and never price above what the data supports. Do that consistently and you stop guessing at value and start knowing it.

The investors who last aren't the ones with the fanciest software or the biggest market. They're the ones who run the same disciplined comp process on every property, stay conservative on the number, and walk away the moment the comps aren't there. That discipline is what keeps you out of the deals that lose money and pointed at the ones that make it. A comp run that takes fifteen minutes and tells you to pass just saved you months.

So start running comps — on your own home, on a house down the street, on a property you're thinking about. Pull three to five sold comps, work the numbers, and compare your estimate to what the place actually sells for. That feedback loop is how the skill sticks. Grab the free Comp Criteria Cheatsheet to keep the whole method in front of you, and run enough properties that the number at the end starts to feel obvious. That's when comps stop being a chore and become your edge.

About The Author

Alex Martinez

Founder & CEO, Real Estate Skills

Alex Martinez is the Founder and CEO of Real Estate Skills. With more than a decade of investing experience and 33+ residential properties acquired, he has personally wholesaled and flipped houses across the country — running comps on every one of them. Through Real Estate Skills, Alex and his team have helped thousands of students learn how to value properties accurately, find deals, and close profitable real estate transactions.

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Real Estate Skills is not a law firm, appraisal firm, or financial advisor, and the information in this article is provided for educational purposes only — it does not constitute legal, tax, financial, or appraisal advice. Property values, comparable sales data, and valuation methods vary by market and change over time, and all figures and examples shown here are illustrative. Real estate investing carries risk, and past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Always consult a licensed appraiser, real estate professional, and your own tax and financial advisors before making an investment or pricing decision.

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