Even though the age of the internet has made a lot of information accessible to all, there are still instances when the expertise of a licensed realtor is needed. Take for instance the sites that allow you to find out the home-value of your home. These sites operate on specific parameters and can not take into account any improvements you have made to your home.

There are two ways to get the value of your home. You can call an appraiser who will give you the value of your home on a fee based service, or you can call your realtor and ask him or her to prepare a market analysis for you. This service should be free and will give you the market value of your home. Please feel free to call us at 812-499-9234 for a free market analysis of your home.

Home-Value Web Sites Miss the Mark

Online home-value sites offer some useful tools, but their estimates are often wrong.

"The percentage of error on these estimates is still very large," says Delores Conway, director of the Casden Forecast at the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate. If there are not many comparable sales in one area, for example, she says, "the estimates will have huge errors in them."

Zillow.com and Cyberhomes.com rely on computer-generated automated models to estimate values. The models help compensate for the fact that many neighborhoods don’t have enough sales to generate accurate values based on experience.

But these computer models don’t reflect home condition, improvements and may not even accurately convey property descriptions.

Marty Frame, general manager of Cyberhomes.com, says the data on the site is best used as a way to form an overall impression of a neighborhood.

"Our goal is to provide you all this information and let you cherry-pick the things that are most interesting to you," Frame says. "You're going to look at an estimate and say, "that makes sense' or 'that doesn't make any sense."'

Source: The Associated Press (06/23/2008)