Short answer: a CMA is your agent's evidence for a price — your home laid beside the similar homes that actually sold nearby, each one adjusted for how it differs from yours, landing on a range instead of a single number. It sits between the online estimate you watch every month and the appraisal a lender orders later. Here is what goes into one, how it differs from the other two numbers, and when to ask for it.
Every CMA stands or falls on its comparables — the comps. Your agent looks for homes a buyer would genuinely cross-shop with yours: nearby, similar in size, age, layout and condition, and sold recently — usually within the last three to six months, because older sales describe a market that may no longer exist. Sold comps carry the report; homes still listed or under contract sit alongside as context, showing what your home competes with and what buyers are currently choosing. A report built on distant, stale or unlike sales is worse than no report, because it lends false confidence to a wrong number.
No two homes are identical, so each comp is adjusted: a comp with an extra bedroom, a finished basement or a renovated kitchen is adjusted down toward your home; one missing what yours has is adjusted up. What survives that arithmetic is not a point but a range — and where a seller positions inside the range is a strategy choice, not a fact: the top of the range asks the market to stretch, the middle meets it, and the bottom invites competition. Anyone who hands you a single exact figure from a CMA is overstating what the document knows.
Three numbers, three makers. The online estimate is a model reading records — it has never seen your home, and it is best used the way Homeowner HQ sends it: as a monthly trend, with your equity beside it. The CMA is your agent's local read of recent sales, built for a pricing decision. The appraisal is a licensed appraiser's formal opinion, ordered by a lender inside a transaction and built to lending standards. They disagree because they are different instruments; the mistake is treating any one of them as the home's single true value rather than asking which job you need done.
Ask before you list, before you count on proceeds for a next purchase, and whenever your tracked estimate and your plans stop agreeing — and ask again if months pass, because a CMA ages with its comps. Bring the facts you have already corrected in your Homeowner HQ record: the model behind your monthly estimate cannot see your renovation or your finished room, but your agent can put them in the comp adjustments, which is exactly where they change the answer.
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.