Your home's value estimate is not a guess and it is not fixed. It is built from evidence — what similar homes nearby actually sold for, what your home is really like, and how many buyers want a home like yours right now. When that evidence changes, the estimate changes. These are the things that move it.
Comparable homes — similar homes nearby that recently sold — do the heaviest lifting. An estimate is anchored on closed sales, not asking prices, because a closed sale is what a buyer actually paid. The closer, more recent, and more alike the sale, the more it counts. A very different home, or a sale from a different area, counts for much less.
Condition moves the number inside the range comparable sales set. A sound roof, working heating and cooling, and no deferred maintenance support the top of the range; visible neglect pulls it down. Real updates count too — a finished basement, an added bathroom, or a kitchen that was actually updated — as long as they are part of the record the estimate is built from.
Size is part of the arithmetic: beds, baths, square footage, and finished living space. Layout matters alongside raw size, because two homes with the same square footage do not live the same way. When the recorded size or layout is wrong, the estimate is calculated from a different home than the one you own.
The same home is worth more when few similar homes are for sale and many buyers want one, and less when many similar homes sit unsold. Supply and demand are local — your street and your price range, not national headlines — and they shift as homes list, sell, and come off the market.
Every time a comparable home nearby closes, that new sale becomes evidence for the next estimate. That is why the number can move in a month when nothing about your own home changed: the record around it changed. Homeowner HQ refreshes the estimate monthly for exactly that reason — so it follows real sales as they close, instead of sitting on stale evidence. One month is a data point; the direction over a few months is the trend.
Part of the estimate is only as good as the facts behind it. If the record says the wrong beds, baths, or square footage, or misses a real update, the estimate is built on the wrong home. In Homeowner HQ you can flag wrong facts from inside your monthly update ("fix my facts"); your agent corrects them, and the value and equity recalculate from the real home.
A Homeowner HQ estimate is not an appraisal.
Your own agent sends a monthly value update from Homeowner HQ — the estimate, labeled as an estimate, with your equity beside it — and HQ runs on Amazon AWS. Realtors and lenders use the same HQ together: homeowners stay connected to their own agent, and the monthly trend is the honest way to watch what is moving the number.
Homeowners are always free. Realtors pay $25/mo to join and lenders join at the $5/mo founding rate, at any book size, with no setup fee; sending messages inside HQ is a $100/mo unlock ($125/mo total for realtors, $105/mo total for lenders). A lender-sponsored realtor joins for $0.
Homeowner HQ is an AI-powered marketing department for agents and lenders — a relationship and revenue engine, not a homeowner database. A homeowner's record routes them back to their own agent; it is never sold and never shown to lenders.