Step 1 of 2 — Your contact details
Every automated valuation, ours included, works the same way: take what public records know about a property, find recent sales of comparable homes nearby, and adjust for the differences the data can see.
That method is genuinely useful and has a hard limit. It knows your home has three bedrooms. It does not know that the kitchen was replaced last year, that the third bedroom only fits a cot, or that the house next door runs a business from the driveway. Those things move real prices and appear in no dataset.
This is why we show a range with a confidence level rather than one confident number. A single figure implies a precision that the underlying data does not support, and a range tells you something a number cannot: how much evidence there actually is for your home.
If you check three tools you will usually get three answers, sometimes far apart. That is not one of them being broken. Each picks its own comparable sales, weights them differently, and updates on a different schedule.
The spread between them is information in itself. When estimates cluster, there is a lot of comparable evidence and the number is probably close. When they scatter, your home is unusual for its area — and the honest answer is that nobody can price it accurately from data alone.
Automated valuations are built from public records and recent nearby sales. They are good at the things that appear in data — square footage, bedroom count, lot size, what similar homes sold for — and blind to everything that does not. A gut renovation and a tired interior look identical in county records. So does a house backing onto a freeway and one backing onto a park. The estimate is not lying to you; it is answering a narrower question than the one you asked, and no automated model can see inside your home.
Accuracy depends almost entirely on how much comparable evidence exists. A three-bedroom tract home in a large development where twelve near-identical houses sold this year can be estimated tightly. An architecturally unusual house, a large lot, or a neighborhood with few recent sales cannot — there is nothing to compare it against. Any tool that gives you a single confident number for both is hiding the difference. That is why we show a range and a confidence level rather than one figure.
Condition is the largest one — kitchens, bathrooms, roof, systems, and whether work was permitted. Then layout, natural light, noise, and what the house looks onto. Then the specifics of a sale: how it was marketed, how long it sat, and whether the buyer needed to move quickly. Two identical houses on the same street can trade well apart for reasons no dataset records.
They answer different questions. An automated valuation is free, instant, and useful for orientation — deciding whether to sell, roughly what a refinance might support, whether an asking price is plausible. A licensed appraisal is a person inspecting the property, and it is what a lender relies on. Use the free estimate to decide whether the conversation is worth having; use an appraisal when money depends on the answer.
No. No account, no card, and no call. Most free valuation tools exist to generate a lead for an agent, which is why the number often arrives attached to someone wanting to list your home. We ask for an email so we can send you the result and how confident it is — not so somebody can ring you about selling.
The reason this page is unusually blunt about what our own tool cannot do is the same reason every listing on KindHome shows its drawbacks. That decision is explained here.
KindHome is not a licensed brokerage or appraiser. An automated valuation is information, not an appraisal, and should not be relied on where a formal valuation is required.