Generate Your Own CMA (Comparative Market Analysis)

Generate a Comparative Market Analysis

You can now get a CMA or Comparative Market Analysis of a home without any special software only available to Realtors. First, you’ll examine and know the subject property. If it’s your home, then you already know it well. If it’s a home you want to purchase, you’ll need to get to know it as well as you can by studying the listing information, including all the data, photos, and maps. You will also need to use a Google or Bing satellite map and even a street view if you can’t drive around the neighborhood yourself.

Second, you’ll select a radius around the subject home with a map search on my map search (iRealtyVirtualHomes)  or you can use Zillow. The size of the radius will depend on the real estate market you dealing with. A metropolitan area with dense housing and lots of sales that are similar within a half a mile might be enough. In a less dense area or a rural market, you will have to expand the radius to reach enough similar homes. One way to adjust the radius is by the number of comparable homes that sold within the radius. You should have at least three and even better six similar homes to include in your mathematical analysis, so if you don’t have enough within a half mile radius, expand it. If one mile isn’t enough in a rural area, expand it again. If you can get three to six comps in one area, you could locate a similar neighborhood even miles away, and create a second radius to identify similar homes.

Third, as a filter for your map search, you’ll select “Sold” homes, not pending or active listings. Listed homes can be priced for dreamers and may end up being forced to reduce the price multiple times until supply and demand determine the actual true fair market value–the sold price.

Fourth, you’ll add more filters to compare only those homes that are as similar as possible to the subject home. Obviously, compare apples with apples. If the subject home is 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2,000 square feet, single level, built in 2018, situated on a peaceful one acre lot with a mountain view, you’re not going to include two story homes that are much older and on 10 acres with a barn. The quality or accuracy of your CMA and the predictive price you assign to the subject property in your final self-generated report depends on the similarity of the comparable homes. Do not do what most lazy listing agents do when they are looking at “comps” in the MLS to determine your listing price, which is to grab what appear to be similar homes on the surface, but are quite different for certain reasons. If you want an accurate CMA, you’re going to have to be patient and diligent to take the time and effort to carefully study listings and only after a lot of hard work will you be able to filter out homes that at first seemed similar but are not truly comparable. When it comes to value, everything in a home is a factor, including the architectural style, the quality of materials and labor, how modern the kitchen and master bedroom and master bathroom are, the type of hardwood or composite flooring or carpet, the technologies used in the home’s construction, and so on.

Select your similar homes on Zillow, because that’s where we’re going to get the sales price history also. Go through all the filters to find comps, and you need to select the right options, including “Sold”, “Price Range” (and narrow the price range to a range of values that you know your subject property will fit well within eliminating low price and high prices that no comps would be in), “No. of Bedrooms”, although in a rural area you can leave the number of bathrooms blank because we don’t have enough inventory to be anal retentive on how many bathrooms must be included in your comps), “Home Type” (select only “Houses” and deselect other options), and under the filter “More” you should select a few more options, including a range for the square feet, a minimum and maximum for acreage, select a home that is older but not too far back from your subject property, and at the bottom select the drop down for sold within the last 12 months, unless you have to adjust that. Don’t forget to zoom in on your Zillow map to include only the area you want, and that will automatically include only the listings in the map you’re looking at.

Fifth, you must have a time limit on how far back you include similar homes that sold within your radius. Certified appraisers who are doing a residential appraisal for a mortgage company have a six-month rule. In a normal market they won’t go back in time to include sold properties beyond six months. That’s because markets evolve and go up and down, so if you get too far away in time from the current state of the market, your math will be off and the estimated fair market value of your subject property will be off one way or the other. But six months is not an absolute rule for you. It’s just a guideline. If you can’t find enough comps, go back further. If the market hasn’t dramatically changed either up or down, you can go back a year, more or less. For extremely unique and expensive luxury homes or big farms (or horse ranches), you may have to expand both the radius and the time you go back to find similar sales.

Once you find a truly similar property, save it as a favorite and to be safe, keep a separate numbered list including each property. You don’t want to spend hours studying properties and select several and then later not be able to find them again. That would be a mini-nightmare.

You will then take a screenshot of the entire price history on Zillow and using an AI agent known as ChatGPT with a prompt I’ll give you, you will upload those screenshots of the price history of each of your comps into ChatGPT to instantly receive an accurate set of calculations you would find in a good CMA helping you make an offer on your ideal retirement home. If you’re doing this for your own home to determine what the listing price should be, this is the best method you’ll find anywhere, better than how sloppy listing agents determine listing prices most of the time. You can upload three images at a minimum, but I recommend finding six comps and uploading the screenshots of all six into ChatGPT.

The way you do this with ChatGPT is you open up the question or query in ChatGPT and you drag and drop the screenshots into one query box, one after another. These screenshots should have extensions like “.jpg” or “.jpeg” or “.png”. Any of those will work fine. After you drag your images into the ChatGPT box, before hitting the enter button, you’ll copy and past this “prompt” I’ve written for you below. Copy and paste this text in the same ChatGPT box where the images are patiently waiting. Then hit the return or enter key.

Warning: You must use the browser edition of ChatGPT, not what is called the “Chat Web” which is a dedicated ChatGPT app. Use the browser edition in Chrome or Safari or any browser. And be sure to select “ChatGPT 4o” and no other version. They have this version programmed to recognize your data on your images, but that won’t happen in some other versions.

1. Click the button below to open ChatGPT in a new tab.
2. Upload your images (Screenshots of selected Zillow listing histories).
3. Copy and paste this detailed prompt exactly as typed into ChatGPT:

Please review these images of home listings and sales history. For each property, extract the following key details:

Original listing price
Final listing price just before the sale
Final sold price
Listing date
Sold date
Any intermediate price reductions

Next, calculate and present a summary report with the following metrics:

iRealty Virtual Brokers – Comparative Market Analysis
Total Number of Properties
Average First Listed Price
Average Days on Market (from last listing date to final sold date)
Average Number of Listing Price Reductions
Average Dollar Amount of Price Reductions
Average Listing Price Immediately Prior to the Final Sold Date
Final Average Sold Price

Finally, display a comparative bar chart at the bottom of the response that includes one bar per property showing:

The final sold price (dark green bar)
The original list price (light green bar, stacked above it)
A thin dark green line to indicate each intermediate price reduction
Include a single legend formatted as follows:
“Sold Price” (dark green bar)
“Original List Price” (light green bar)
“Price Reductions” (thin green line — include this legend item only once)

The summary report should appear at the top, and the chart should be positioned cleanly at the end with no additional content below it.

Open ChatGPT to Generate a Report

Tip: Try to upload images that show the list price, list date, sold price, and sold date as clearly as possible. You can simply copy a portion of the screen with the listing and sales data (screenshot). You can open up any listing in Zillow and scroll down to the listing history, and take a screenshot of that section from the listing date to the sold date. You can upload images like this on several or many homes that are similar to the one you want to make an offer on, and this will generate one of the sweetest little CMAs you could ask for, and it’s quite accurate.

This is an example of what one screenshot of a listing history in a Zillow listing. You upload this image in ChatGPT and as many other comparable homes’ listing history to the same query in ChatGPT, and paste in the prompt I’ve given you below the images but before you hit the return to upload the images.