Free home valuation
What Is Your O‘ahu Home Worth?
Not an instant estimate. A written comparative market analysis that Tiffani prepares herself, for your building or your street, with the reasoning attached so you can argue with it.
Every valuation site on the internet will give you a number in four seconds. That number is produced by a model that has never seen your unit, does not know which way your windows face, and cannot tell a 2020 renovation from a 1977 original. It is a starting point for curiosity. It is not something to make a six-figure decision on.
What Tiffani sends instead takes a few business days and is signed by a person you can call back. There is no listing agreement attached to it and no obligation to sell.
What you get
Five things, in writing
1. Comparable sales for your actual building or street
Closed sales inside the last twelve months, restricted to your building where the building has enough sales, or to your street and immediate blocks where it does not. Each comp is adjusted for floor, parking stalls, view corridor, square footage and maintenance fee, and each adjustment is shown rather than buried.
2. A realistic price range, with the reasoning
A range, not a single figure, because a single figure is a guess pretending to be a fact. You get the number Tiffani would list at, the number she thinks it closes at, and the point where the home starts sitting. Plus what is currently active against you, since a buyer compares your home to what they can walk into on Sunday, not to what closed in March.
3. An estimated net proceeds sheet
The number that actually matters. Sale price down through commissions, Hawai‘i conveyance tax (which scales with price and with whether the buyer will occupy, so it is a larger line on a high-priced sale than most sellers expect), escrow and title fees, any HARPTA withholding if you are an out-of-state owner, and your estimated mortgage payoff. What lands in your account, roughly, on the day you sign.
4. A prioritized fix list with expected return
What to do before listing, ordered by return rather than by effort, with a rough cost against a rough gain for each item. This is where her design background does the work. It usually includes fewer projects and less money than sellers expect, and it is specific to your rooms, not a checklist copied off a blog.
5. A timing recommendation
Whether to list now, in six weeks, or after a specific event. Military PCS cycles move Windward buyer demand. So does an AOAO special assessment landing in the minutes, or a competing unit in your building going under contract. Sometimes the honest answer is that you should wait, and she will tell you that.
And a call to go through it
About twenty minutes on the phone, or at your kitchen table if you prefer. You can ask why any comp was included or thrown out. Nothing in the report is a number you are asked to take on faith.
Why the algorithm misses
O‘ahu breaks automated valuations in specific ways
This is not a complaint about technology. Automated models work reasonably well in a subdivision of four hundred similar houses in Texas. O‘ahu has four conditions that they handle poorly.
- Leasehold against fee simple. Hawai‘i still has a meaningful number of leasehold properties, and a leasehold unit is not worth what the fee simple unit next door is worth. The lease rent renegotiation date matters, the remaining term matters, and whether the fee is available to purchase matters. A model that treats the two as interchangeable can be off by an enormous margin in either direction.
- Maintenance fees that vary wildly building to building. Two 900 square foot units a mile apart, one with a $500 monthly fee and one with $1,100, do not sell for the same price. That $600 gap is real money against a buyer’s debt-to-income ratio, so it directly changes who can qualify for your unit. Fees also cover different things. Some include water, sewer, cable and even electricity. A model reading only price per square foot sees none of this.
- View corridors. Two units on the same floor of the same building, one looking at the Ko‘olau and one looking at the parking structure, are different products at different prices. No public data feed knows which way your windows point or whether the lot across the street is entitled to build up and take your view.
- Almost no true comps in small buildings. A 24-unit walk-up might see two sales in three years. When the model runs out of local data it borrows from buildings blocks away that share nothing with yours except a zip code, and the confidence interval quietly widens to something useless.
One honest example. On Tiffani’s current Honolulu listing, 1250 Richard Lane #408, the automated estimate reads $323,100 against a $330,000 asking price. That is close, and on a straightforward fee simple unit with recent building sales it often will be. The gap widens on leasehold units, on view units, and in small buildings, which is exactly where sellers most need the number to be right.
Renovation quality is the other blind spot. A model cannot see that a kitchen was redone in 2020 with new flooring, new appliances and custom tile, and it certainly cannot see the difference between work that was permitted and work that was not.
How it works
Four steps, no pressure at any of them
Send the address
Street, unit number, and anything public records would not know. Renovations, upgrades, your view, how many parking stalls, fee simple or leasehold.
She pulls the data
MLS closed sales, pendings and current actives for your building or block, plus tax records and, for condos, the AOAO documents if you have them.
She sees it
For an accurate number rather than an approximate one, she walks it. Twenty minutes at the property changes the range more often than any spreadsheet does.
You get the report
Written, emailed, then a short call to walk through it. Keep it, sit on it for a year, or send it to your accountant. It is yours.
If you are only trying to settle an argument with a family member about what the place is worth, that is a completely fine reason to ask. Say so and you will get the same report.
Request your valuation
Send Tiffani your address
Call, text or email with the property address and unit number. She will confirm what she needs and give you a date for the report.
Tiffani Stanger, REALTOR® and Broker, Ralph S. Foulger. Hawai‘i license RB-23856. Based in Kane‘ohe, working all of O‘ahu.
Already know the number and ready for the next part?
Free valuation
Request your free home valuation
Put the property address in the message box below, plus anything you think matters (recent updates, the view, the maintenance fee). I will send you a real number with the reasoning behind it, usually within one business day.