A native Californian transplanted in southern Illinois.Yesterday I stumbled upon a real estate site I had never seen before. It is
www.redfin.com.It is quite different from both Zillow and Trulia, in that you choose 5 recently sold homes, and it calculates your home value based on those sales. Since I live in a large (four hundred or so homes) cookie-cutter subdivision, and since there are plenty of recent sales to choose from, I felt this should work great for me.
I chose 5 single family 4/2 1440 sq. ft. homes which have all closed this calendar year. This is the type of home I have; two were even the exact same floor plan! Of course, there is no way to know for sure how the condition of those homes would compare with mine. But still, I think those sales should be a fairly good indication of the value of my home.
Well, the results showed a value of 148k for my home. What great news! Still upside down, but much less so.
I am going to begin using Redfin each month for my home value when I do my net worth.
In budgeting news, yesterday I received my annual escrow analysis. Both my insurance and property taxes have increased, resulting in a shortage. My PITI is going from 1081.63 to 1111.38 beginning August 1. This means I will have to jiggle my budget around a small bit.
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