How to Find Comps on Zillow — and the Three Things It Won’t Show You
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Short answer
Search the address, then use the map search rather than the property page: set the listing type to Sold, restrict Sold in the last to 3–6 months, then match beds, baths, square footage and home type to the subject. Zillow will not show you seller concessions, true condition at the time of sale, or a confirmed closed price in non-disclosure states — so treat the result as a candidate list, not a valuation.
Zillow is where most people start, and for a homeowner without MLS access that is a reasonable choice. The mechanics take about two minutes. The part worth reading is what happens after.
The filter path, step by step
The most common mistake is starting from the subject property's own page. That page shows you Zillow's estimate and a short "nearby homes" strip chosen for engagement, not comparability. Start from the map instead.
- Search the address or neighbourhood to centre the map on the subject.
- Open the listing-type filter (labelled For Sale by default). Deselect For Sale. Select Sold.
- Set "Sold in the last" to 3 months if the market is active, 6 if it is thin. Anything older needs a market-conditions adjustment.
- Set home type to match the subject exactly. Single family and townhouse are not interchangeable, and condo is a different animal entirely.
- Set beds and baths to a band, not an exact value — subject count and one either side.
- Set square footage to roughly 10–15% around the subject.
- Zoom the map to the real boundary, not a radius. This matters more than any filter above.
That last step is the one that separates a usable list from a noisy one. Zillow will happily show you a sale across a school district line or the far side of a six-lane arterial as though it were next door. Zoom and pan to the subdivision or attendance boundary and ignore what falls outside it.
Read each candidate's price history, not just its price
Open each surviving candidate and scroll to the price and tax history table. It is the most useful thing on the page and almost nobody reads it.
What to look for:
- Listed high, reduced, then sold. The sale price is real, but the property took the market's correction. Useful evidence about where demand actually sits.
- Listed and sold in under a week at or above list. Possibly underpriced, possibly a genuinely hot micro-market. Either way, one data point, not a trend.
- Listed, delisted, relisted. Days on market resets, so the displayed DOM understates how long the property really sat. See days on market vs. cumulative days on market.
- A previous sale at a very different price. Either the property was renovated in between, or one of the two transactions was not arm's length.
The three things Zillow won't show you
These are not interface complaints. They are structural, and they are why a Zillow comp set is a starting point.
1. Seller concessions
A home that closed at $520,000 with $15,000 in seller-paid closing costs did not sell for $520,000 in economic terms. The MLS usually records the concession. Zillow does not publish it.
In a buyer's market, concessions become common and the gap between recorded price and real price widens across the whole comp set at once. That is exactly when Zillow comps drift furthest from reality, and exactly when nothing on the page tells you it is happening.
2. Condition at the time of sale
Listing photos usually survive on a sold record, which helps. What does not survive is the agent's private remarks — the line that said "sold as-is, foundation work needed" or "seller will not repair." Two identical houses, one renovated and one dated, look nearly identical in a Zillow row of specs. The price difference between them is often the largest single adjustment in the whole analysis.
3. A confirmed closed price, in about a dozen states
In non-disclosure states, sale prices are not entered into public records at all. Texas, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alaska and parts of Missouri.
Zillow can still show a sale occurred and when. The price attached to it is agent-supplied or estimated. If you are pulling comps in Austin or Dallas or Boise from a public site, this is the fact that matters most and the one least likely to be labelled.
Zestimates are not comps
Worth stating plainly because the interface makes it easy to blur. A Zestimate is a model's guess about a house that did not sell. A comp is a house that did.
If you build a price by averaging four Zestimates, you have averaged four model outputs and inherited the model's error four times over. Use sold prices only. The published accuracy figures for off-market homes are considerably worse than for on-market ones — the detail is in the Zestimate breakdown.
How far Zillow comps will actually get you
| Use case | Zillow good enough? |
|---|---|
| Curiosity about your own home's value | Yes |
| Deciding roughly whether to sell this year | Yes |
| Sanity-checking your agent's suggested price | Mostly — ask about concessions |
| Setting a list price | No — concession and condition gaps are too big |
| Evidence for a property tax appeal | Rarely — boards want assessor records |
| Anything a lender or appraiser will read | No |
A better sequence
If you have twenty minutes rather than two, do this instead:
- Pull candidates on Zillow using the filter path above.
- Cross-check the same properties on Redfin — disagreement between them is a signal worth chasing.
- Verify square footage and lot size against your county assessor's record.
- Look at every surviving comp's photos.
- Screen the list down properly — the six-step screen.
That sequence removes most of what makes free-site comps unreliable, without needing an MLS login.
The bottom line
Zillow's sold data is genuinely useful and genuinely free. Switch to Sold, constrain the window, match the property, and respect real boundaries instead of a radius.
Then remember what is missing: the concession, the condition, and in a dozen states the price itself. Those three gaps are why an agent with the same twenty minutes and an MLS login arrives at a different number — not because they searched harder, but because their source records things Zillow never sees.
Frequently asked questions
How do I see recently sold homes on Zillow?
Use the map search rather than an individual property page. Enter the area or address, open the listing-type filter, deselect For Sale and select Sold, then set Sold in the last to your preferred window — 3 or 6 months for comp work. The map will repopulate with closed sales you can filter further by beds, baths, square footage and home type.
Are Zillow comps accurate?
The sold prices themselves are generally accurate in states that disclose sale prices, because they come from MLS feeds and public records. What is not reliable is the comparison: Zillow does not publish seller concessions, does not verify condition at time of sale, and mixes Zestimates into the same interface as real sales. The data is a reasonable starting point and a poor finishing point.
Why does Zillow show no sold prices for my area?
You are probably in a non-disclosure state, where sale prices are not entered into public records. Texas is the largest. In those markets Zillow can show that a property sold and when, but any price shown is either agent-supplied or estimated, not a verified public record.
What is the difference between a Zestimate and a comp?
A comp is a real transaction: a specific property that actually sold for a specific price on a specific date. A Zestimate is a model output for a property that did not sell. Using Zestimates as comps compounds model error, because you are averaging estimates instead of anchoring to sales.
Can I download comps from Zillow?
There is no export function for consumers. You can copy the details manually or take screenshots. Bulk scraping is against Zillow terms of use. If you need comps in a document, use a tool built to produce one rather than trying to extract them from the site.
Sources
- Zillow filter behaviour described here reflects the consumer web interface as of August 2026. Zillow changes its interface periodically; the underlying steps — switch listing type to Sold, constrain the sold window, then match property characteristics — have been stable but the exact labels may move.
- Non-disclosure states (where sale prices are not public record) commonly listed as Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri (some counties), Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
- Zestimate accuracy figures are published by Zillow, an interested party, and are measured on Zillow’s own methodology. See the linked Zestimate article for the current published numbers and their limits.