How old can comps be for an appraisal?

For an appraisal, recent comps are preferred and similar comps matter more. Appraisers reach first for sales within the last few months, but an older sale of a genuinely comparable house beats a fresh sale of a different one.

That is the part people have backwards. When I am pricing a house, the comparison has to be apples to apples. An apple and an orange will still give you a number — it just will not be a useful one.

Why people ask this

Usually because they have been shown a comparable sale that is older than they expected, and it feels like a weaker argument.

Sometimes it is. Often it is the opposite. Here is how I think about it.

An older sale on a house that genuinely matches yours — same floor plan, similar lot, similar condition, same street or the next one — tells you a lot about what your house is. A sale from last month on a house two hundred square feet larger with a finished basement you do not have tells you about a different house, and the difference has to be guessed at.

The first needs a time adjustment, which is a known problem. The second needs several adjustments stacked on each other, and every adjustment adds error.

What makes a sale comparable

In roughly the order that matters.

Location. Same subdivision, ideally the same street. Across a city boundary or a school boundary is a different market even if the distance is short.

Size and layout. Square footage, bedroom and bathroom count, and whether the space is above grade or below. Finished basement space is not valued the same as main-floor space.

Age and condition. A house with a new roof, furnace and windows is a different product from the same house with original everything. What adds value to a home in Utah covers which of those actually moves a number.

Lot. Size, usability, slope, view, and what backs onto it.

Sale conditions. A sale between family, a foreclosure, or a transaction with unusual seller concessions is not an open-market comparison.

Date. Last, and still real.

Why appraisers sometimes go further than you expect

Three situations, all legitimate.

The house is unusual. A custom home, a very large lot, an unusual floor plan. Genuine matches are rare and sometimes the nearest one is older or further away. Steeplechase in Draper is a good example of this — a neighborhood of large custom homes where published averages are calculated from very few sales, and one sale is not a market.

The neighborhood has low turnover. Established areas where people stay a long time generate few sales.

A neighboring city is the better match. Sometimes the genuinely comparable house is across a municipal line. That is allowed and sometimes correct, provided the appraiser accounts for the differences the line creates — school district, services, taxes.

How the date gets handled

Through a market conditions adjustment. The appraiser looks at how values in that area have moved between the sale date and now, and adjusts the older sale up or down.

That adjustment is explainable and documented, which is why an older sale is workable. What is not workable is pretending the date does not matter.

I am not going to tell you how much to adjust by. That depends on the submarket and the period, it changes, and a figure here would be wrong for your house. Ask the appraiser or your agent to show you the basis for the adjustment they used.

For sellers: what this means at listing

Your house has a rival out there somewhere, and finding it is the job.

If the only sales anyone can point to are different houses, your price is resting on adjustments rather than on evidence, and an appraiser may reach different conclusions than your listing did. What happens if the appraisal comes in low covers the options when it does.

Ask whoever prices your house to show you the comparable sales and say out loud why each one is comparable. If the answer is a list of addresses with no reasoning, press on it. What a CMA actually is describes what that analysis should contain.

For buyers: the same question in reverse

If you are making an offer and the listing price looks high, ask which sales support it. Then ask whether those houses are actually like this one.

Overpricing frequently traces to one unrepresentative sale — the best-updated house on the street, or a larger floor plan — being treated as the benchmark.

The adjustment stack, and why it is the real risk

Every difference between your house and a comparable sale gets adjusted for. That is how appraisal works and it is reasonable.

The problem is that adjustments compound. One adjustment for square footage is an estimate. Add a second for the finished basement, a third for the extra bathroom, a fourth for the lot, a fifth for condition, and you have an estimate built on five estimates. Each one is defensible. The total can be well off.

This is why “how old is the comp” is the wrong first question. The better one is how many adjustments does this comparison require? A sale from six months ago needing one time adjustment is a cleaner piece of evidence than last month’s sale needing five.

When you look at a set of comparable sales, count the adjustments rather than the dates. The sale with the fewest is usually telling you the most, and it is frequently not the most recent one.

A practical version: ask which comparable sale required the smallest total adjustment, and why. Anyone who prices houses properly can answer that immediately.

What I actually see

Sellers who reject an older comparable sale and accept a newer irrelevant one.

The date is the easiest thing to evaluate, so it gets the weight. Nobody argues with “that sale is four months old.” Everybody should argue with “that house has a finished basement and mine does not,” and almost nobody does, because it requires looking past the headline number.

The other pattern is the single-sale anchor. One neighbor sold high, that number lodges, and every conversation after that is measured against it. Sometimes that sale was the genuine match. Often it was the renovated one.

What to do next

Ask to see the comparable sales in writing, with the reasoning for each. Then ask the question that actually matters: is this the same house, in the same place, in the same condition? If not, what changed and by how much?

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and I would rather show you a slightly older sale of your house’s twin than a fresh sale of something else. Send me your address and I will show you what I think its rival is.