How recent is the est. value that pulled up during the historical transactions search? For example I am looking at a 3rd party transaction that has a sale date of 1/3/2011, a sale amount of 30,000, and est. value of 100,000. Does this mean the transaction relfects a 70% discount at the time when the buyer bid the property? If it was not a static snap-shot value at that particular time then how often does this est value updated?
Thanks in advance.
Hi James,
We update the AVM at least every 60 days. We will show you the date of the AVM next to the value. This will tell you the date that we pulled this value.
In order to determine the discount you would need to look at the transaction history to see if this was a loan in a second position? What was the published bid? Opening bid? There could also be other contributing factors that could influence the value like past due property taxes or condition of the property? It is hard to tell what happened based solely on the AVM and the winning bid.
Hi,
I know Sean would not be sloppy with #'s but there are many AVM’s with great $ variance among them. Has the one(s) you use been checked for accuracy against Solds or some other metric?
Hi Davidz, You know Sean well if you know that he is a stickler for the numbers. He is also pretty tough on AVM’s because they are based only on public records and and we all know that basing a valuation solely on public records does not necessarily give you a full picture. That said, an AVM can be a great valuation guide and a basis for your research. Our AVM has been extensively tested and has been ranked among the top 10 in independent tests. We buy a 3rd party AVM but are not allowed to say whose as it is sold for as much as $20 per property by other providers.
Thanks as usual. Could we access the top 10 AVM list you mentioned? It would be great to have more than 1 AVM to dispute the servicer’s valuation on a short sale negotiation.
Hi Davidz, There are several companies that sell these AVM’s. We would not have access to all 10. You can certainly compare with the free online AVM’s. Even if you have access to all 10 none of them will ever replace a BPO or an appraisal in terms of a physical inspection of the property.
Follow up: Since the “deciders” that we negotiate against respect AVMs it is more ammunition for us to use some also. Unfortunately, appraisals cost too much for most deals.
Could you list some of the free AVM’s?
Hi David, There are certainly the free sites like Zillow. You can contact Corelogic or DataQuick. Each of these companies have a number of fee based AVM’s that they can sell to you. There is a new AVM provided by RPR that you can check out. LPS also has their own AVM products. You are not going to find much out there for free.
Michelle,
Thanks for the original reply, that answered the question of timing on the estimated value pulled. Back then, I wanted to know the estimated market value near the time of a successful auction because I was trying to identify the level of correlation between discount and profitability for a selected pool of assets. If foreclosure radar continues to update the estimated value after the property has been successfully sold to 3rd party then I will not be able to use the ‘estimated value’ in my analysis. It would be great to have both static value snapshot on the successful auction sale date, as well as the ‘valuation date’ data available within the excel export. Thanks again for the original reply.