How to Get Real Estate Comps Without a Realtor
undefined
Short answer
Use Redfin for sold prices, your county assessor for property facts, and cross-check on Zillow and Realtor.com. Screen to three to six arm's-length sales in the last 3–6 months, inside the same school and subdivision boundaries, within about 10–15% on square footage. You can get close this way. What you cannot get without MLS access is seller concessions, private remarks, and — in about a dozen non-disclosure states, Texas included — a confirmed sale price at all.
You do not need a licence to look at what houses sold for. Sold prices on public sites and county records are public information, and researching your own property is not a regulated activity.
What you need is a method, because the free sources are individually incomplete and the gaps are not where beginners expect.
Step 1 — Establish the subject property honestly
Before looking at a single comp, write down what you are comparing against. Not what you think the house is worth — what it is.
- Above-grade finished square footage (basement counted separately)
- Bedrooms and full/half bathrooms
- Lot size
- Year built, and year of any major renovation
- Garage spaces, stories, pool, and anything unusual
- Condition, rated bluntly: dated, average, updated, renovated
Pull the first five from your county assessor's property search — every county has one, most are free, and it is the authoritative record for physical characteristics. If the county's square footage disagrees with what you believe, find out which is right now, because every number downstream depends on it.
Rate the condition as a stranger would. This is where homeowner estimates go wrong most often, and no amount of good comp selection recovers from it.
Step 2 — Pull candidates from Redfin first
Redfin is the strongest free source for sold data because it participates in MLS feeds directly as a brokerage, and its sold filters are the closest a consumer site comes to a real comp search.
Filter to: sold status, last 3–6 months, your home type exactly, beds within one, square footage within about 15%. Then draw the geography by hand on the map rather than accepting a radius — stay inside your subdivision and your school attendance boundary.
Repeat the same search on Zillow and Realtor.com. You are looking for two things: properties one site has and another missed, and prices that disagree between sites. Both are informative.
Step 3 — Verify each candidate against county records
This is the step that separates real work from browsing, and almost nobody does it.
For each surviving candidate, look up the county record and check the square footage against what the listing site claimed. Discrepancies are common. Listing sites inherit whatever was entered into the MLS, which is agent-entered and sometimes wrong; county records are independently measured but can be out of date after a renovation.
When they disagree, the listing photos usually settle it. A house with an obviously finished basement whose county record shows only above-grade space explains its own discrepancy.
Step 4 — Screen down to three to six
Now cut. In order:
- Arm's length only. Remove foreclosures, estate and probate sales, family transfers, anything transferring to a trust or LLC. A price far below the street's pattern is telling you something — find out what before using or discarding it.
- Recency. 0–3 months ideal, 3–6 good, 6–12 only if the set is thin.
- Boundaries, not distance. A house across a school district line is not comparable, however close it is.
- Type and configuration. Detached versus attached, single versus two-storey where your market cares.
- Size band. Within roughly 10–15% above grade.
- Condition. Look at every photo set. This is the step you can do as well as any professional, and it matters as much as the rest combined.
The full version of this sequence, with the disqualifiers, is in how to find comps without guessing.
Step 5 — Adjust, roughly but honestly
You are not producing an appraisal. You are producing a defensible range. Adjust the comp toward the subject: if the comp has something yours lacks, subtract from the comp's price; if yours has something the comp lacks, add.
Keep adjustments conservative. The most common amateur error is adjusting renovations at cost — a $60,000 kitchen does not add $60,000. Market recovery on most improvements is well under cost. Adjustment mechanics are here.
If a comp needs more than about 15% in net adjustments, drop it. It is telling you it was not comparable.
What you genuinely can't replicate
Four things, and being clear-eyed about them is the difference between a useful estimate and false confidence.
| Missing | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Seller concessions | A $520,000 sale with $15,000 in seller-paid costs is really a $505,000 sale. Not published publicly. |
| Private remarks | "Sold as-is, foundation issues" never reaches a public site. Explains outlier prices. |
| Confirmed price in non-disclosure states | In Texas and about eleven others the price is not public record at all. |
| Withdrawn and expired listings | What did not sell, and at what price, is real evidence about the ceiling. |
The non-disclosure point deserves emphasis because it invalidates the whole method in about a dozen states. If you are in Austin, Boise, Wichita or Baton Rouge, the sold prices you see on public sites are estimates or agent-supplied figures, not verified records. You can still learn a lot from what is listed and what is pending. You cannot verify a closed price without MLS-derived data.
How close will this get you?
In a disclosure state, in a tract subdivision with plenty of recent sales, a careful homeowner following the five steps above will usually land within a few percent of what a good agent would produce.
The gap widens fast when the property is unusual, the market is thin, condition varies a lot across the street, or concessions are common. Those are exactly the situations where the free method loses the most, and they are not always obvious from the outside.
When to stop doing it yourself
Do it yourself for: deciding whether to sell this year, sanity-checking an agent's proposed price, deciding whether a tax assessment is worth appealing, or setting expectations before a refinance.
Get help for: setting an actual list price, anything a lender will read, or a genuinely unusual property. And note that a CMA and an appraisal are different documents — if you need something with formal standing, only the appraisal has it.
The bottom line
Establish your subject from county records, pull candidates from Redfin, cross-check on Zillow and Realtor.com, verify every candidate's square footage, screen to three to six, and adjust conservatively.
That gets a homeowner most of the way for free. Know which state you are in, know that concessions and condition notes are invisible to you, and treat the result as a range rather than a number.
Frequently asked questions
Can I find comps for my house without a real estate agent?
Yes, in most states. Redfin, Zillow and Realtor.com publish recent sold prices, and county assessor records provide square footage, lot size and year built for verification. The method works well enough for deciding whether to sell, and less well for setting an exact list price, because concession data and condition notes are not public.
How do I find out what a house sold for without a realtor?
Check Redfin or Zillow first, then your county recorder or assessor site, which in disclosure states records the transfer price. In non-disclosure states — Texas, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alaska and parts of Missouri — the sale price is not public record and any figure you see is agent-supplied or estimated.
Is it illegal to look up comps without a license?
No. Sold prices on public sites and county records are publicly available information and anyone may look at them. What requires a licence is providing a valuation opinion to someone else for compensation, which is a different activity from researching your own property.
How many comps do I need to price my own home?
Three to six closed sales. Fewer than three gives you no pattern to read; more than six usually means you loosened the screen and added weaker properties, which widens the range rather than tightening it.
Will a lender accept comps I found myself?
No. Lenders rely on a licensed appraiser, and an appraisal is a formal report with defined standards and liability behind it. Your own research is useful for your decisions — pricing, negotiating, deciding whether to appeal a tax assessment — but it has no standing in a lending decision.
Sources
- Non-disclosure states, where sale prices are not recorded in public records, are commonly listed as Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri (some counties), Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. Publisher lists vary slightly because some states disclose partially.
- Fannie Mae Selling Guide B4-1.3-08, "Comparable Sales" (effective 06/04/2025) — a minimum of three closed comparables must be reported in the sales comparison approach; comparables closed within the last 12 months should be used.
- FHFA Uniform Appraisal Dataset Public Use File, a 5% nationally representative random sample of appraisals 2013–2021 — the average and median number of comparables per appraisal was five.