What GenieAVM™ is
GenieAVM™ is our own valuation engine. It values a property against recent sales in that property's own market, taken from your MLS feed — not from a national model bought in from a data vendor, and not the same estimate your seller has already read on a portal.
Every figure it produces comes with the comparable sales behind it, what was adjusted on each one, and a statement of how much the local evidence supports the result.
Reading the confidence
Every valuation carries a confidence. It reflects how much the sales around that property actually explain their own prices — how many recent comparable sales there are, how alike they are, and how much of what matters about them the listing agents recorded.
A lower confidence is not a fault in the tool. It is the tool telling you that the homes around this one vary in ways the recorded data does not capture, and that your own judgement matters more here than usual.
When it declines to answer
GenieAVM™ will sometimes give you no figure at all, and say why. The commonest reason is a home with no floor area on record: floor area is what nearby sales are priced on, so without it there is nothing to price against. Add a measured size and the valuation follows in seconds.
It will also decline where there are too few comparable sales nearby to support a figure. In both cases it names the reason rather than producing a number with nothing behind it — a confident-looking valuation an agent cannot defend is worse than no valuation.
Mobile and park homes
A coach on a rented space in a park is priced on different terms from a house, because the buyer is not buying the ground it stands on. GenieAVM™ treats it as its own market and values it only against other park homes.
Many boards hold few such sales, so a park home will often return no figure rather than one built from houses. That is the right answer: valued against ordinary homes nearby, a park home reads as several times what it would actually fetch.
A manufactured home on land the owner holds is a different case and is treated as one. It is matched with other manufactured homes where enough have sold nearby, and where they have not, the search widens to houses and the confidence drops to say so.
How it chooses which sales to use
A comparable sale has to be the same kind of home, a like size, and close by — but those three are not enough on their own. A modest condominium and a luxury one can sit on the same street, share a floor area, and sell for three times apart. No adjustment for square footage bridges that, because the difference is finishes, outlook and the quality of the building rather than space.
So sales that belong to a different price tier are set aside before the figure is worked out. Any sale set aside this way is listed with the valuation, so you can see what was left out and why rather than wondering where a number came from.
Where the MLS holds only a handful of sales for a property, the engine also draws on sales recorded at the county that were never listed — estate transfers, builder sales, a deal done between neighbours. In some mountain and rural markets that is a third of everything that changed hands. Transfers between family members are excluded, since they are not sales at a market price.
When the record is wrong
Listing records carry mistakes, and a mistake in the record becomes a mistake in the valuation. A unit typed as a townhouse in a complex of condominiums will be valued against townhouses, and if the market holds nine of those and hundreds of condominiums, the figure is built on the wrong nine.
GenieAVM™ checks a property’s own details against the parcels around it before it asks for comparable sales. Where the surrounding block plainly disagrees — on the kind of home, its water rights, or which neighbourhood it belongs to — the correction is applied and marked on screen, with the number of neighbouring parcels it was drawn from. Nothing is changed in your MLS; the correction applies to the valuation only.
Which markets it is strongest in
Where housing stock is consistent — tracts, subdivisions, planned communities — homes of similar size and age sell at similar prices, and GenieAVM™ lands close.
In hillside, resort and rural markets, two homes of the same size on the same road can sell far apart on condition and outlook. GenieAVM™ reports lower confidence in those markets rather than dressing up a guess, and the comparable sales it shows you are often worth more than the figure itself.
GenieAVM™ and GenieCMA™
GenieAVM™ is an automated figure with its working shown. GenieCMA™ is your own analysis, with your judgement in it. For a listing presentation, use GenieCMA™ — and use GenieAVM™ and its comparable sales as the evidence you build it from.
Availability
GenieAVM™ is part of Property Intelligence™: a $99/mo add-on on the Agent tier, included in Agent Pro and Team.
