How to Use Redfin to Determine Land Value

See the full blog post at: retipster.com/vacant-land-valuation/
Check out Redfin at: redfin.com/

There's a common problem I've always had to wrestle with when buying vacant land. The issue boils down to VALUATION.

Land is a peculiar type of real estate because in the vast majority of cases, it is EXTREMELY difficult to come up with a rock-solid, 100% reliable "market value" for this type of property (ask a professional real estate appraiser and chances are, they're basically "winging it" in this area, because the data just isn't there).

So how are we supposed to be confident in the value of what we're buying and selling? After all, this number is hugely important - it's the basis of everything we do!

In the past, I've always maneuvered through this process by following the guidelines in this blog post: retipster.com/valueofland - which I've found points to a reasonably strong conclusion, but if you're looking for even more of a quantitative, measurable approach with which to gauge land values, there is an EPIC trick I just learned about from Karl James (one of our faithful members in the REipster Forum).

Karl uses a similar approach to the one I use to find sales comps on Zillow, but he goes one step further by analyzing the data with MUCH greater mathematical precision.

Karl uses Redfin, which provides much of the same information as Zillow, only Redfin allows users to download all the sales comp data in a CSV file (which may not seem significant at first glance, but trust me - it opens up all kinds of possibilities when it comes to analyzing the numbers and putting this data to work).

The video above explains how the whole process works!