DNJ Mortgage: What is your home's value? DNJ Mortgage Raleigh NC

The low down
Figuring out your home's value is a bit more difficult than ever, and doing it for free is darn near impossible. But to get a basic idea, you can approach the situation with some info from this post. But to disclaim up front, no value from these methods should be relied upon when making a serious decision about your mortgage or financing situation.
Traditionally, like I explained in a previous entry about the HVCC, appraisers would stick to certain areas of town and would slowly develop their expertise with regards to the homes and neighborhoods in that area. They could often provide some idea of a home's value in a certain area just by considering its location relative to other homes they've appraised. This guestimate would help the borrower determine if moving forward with the refinance was worth the cost involved. Because of the HVCC, this practice isn't an option anymore. Recently, people have started to pay closer attention to their tax values when attempting to determine their value. The tax value of most homes is a fair to good indicator of the value but I've noticed in the last two years that these values are farther and farther from realistic figures. So I'm going to give you some alternate methods of exploring your home's perceived value. None of these will include any value increases that may be expected from remodeling or updates. When major home renovations are done, only a full appraisal will provide an accurate value. You should not make any decisions just based off of these methods - the market in Raleigh as well as everywhere else is quite turbulent and determining the true value of your home should be left to a professional appraisal.
-Some Quick and Easy (& not so accurate) Methods-

1. Zillow

Zillow.com provides estimates of home values and real estate trends for most US cities. Zillow accomplishes this by purchasing large quantities of real estate data, mapping lot sizes, and comparing recently sold comparable sized homes in that area. Because its system is run primarily from purchased data that is not always 100% accurate, its estimates are sometimes completely off the mark. I've used it and the majority of the time the estimate provided is plus or minus $8,000 from the tax value of the home.

2. eppraisal & Yahoo

Eppraisal and Yahoo just report an average of the values given on other websites (zillow and cyberhomes). The values on these sites seem a bit on the high end and aren't very reliable or realistic, in my opinion. Comparing my home, there's a $30k difference between the tax value and the eppraisal estimated value. I'm not sure about you, but my financial planning doesn't work with that kind of variance. The only good aspect of these two services is that they provide recent sales data for you to compare.

3. Cyberhomes

This runs closer to what zillow has to offer but tends to estimate more conservatively.

-Determining the value via a per sqaure footage calculation-

If all the free home valuation websites have narrowed your value down to a $50k+ range and you're ready to explore some more serious calculations, you may want to get out a sheet of graph paper and log into your County government tax & property website. I'm going to use Wake County's as an example. The property search page where you enter your address can be found here. After you've got the account summary for your home opened, you'll see what value the city has determined your taxes be based from (image #1). At the top in blue you'll see a series of links. What you're wanting to consider is what you'll find on the recent sales page (image #2). This page will show you all the data on the most recent sales in the immediate area (image #3). Now here's where your work begins. To find a semi-accurate value to work from, you'll need to 1. calculate the per square foot price of your home (tax value/sqft) and 2. compare it to the per square foot price of homes that were recently sold, dates for these sales are in the very last column on the right. Make sure you're comparing the sqft price for homes that are close to your home's size, location, and amenities (garage, pool, etc). If you're calculation brings you to a $180/sqft price and the identical home next-door just sold for $150/sqft, then you know that your tax value doesn't represent your actual value. And again, if you've updated all your fixtures to solid gold marble accented pieces, this method will not reflect those upgrades. This process isn't totally accurate and shouldn't be used to base any of your decisions off of, but it will provide a much closer estimate of your value than just dialing up your address on zillow.