If you’re thinking about listing your home in Fairfield or New Haven County, an automated estimate from an online tool may already be influencing your expectations. According to Kristin Egmont, a Connecticut real estate agent with more than 20 years of experience in these markets, that number is often a starting point that needs recalibration.
“Zillow is not an accurate reflection of value,” Egmont said. “It’s an estimate, but it doesn’t tell you what’s in the house. It doesn’t know what kind of fixtures you have. It’s just looking at area sales. Your house could be worth more than what Zillow is saying – or it could be worth less.”
Automated valuation tools work from publicly available data such as square footage, bedroom and bathroom count, location, and nearby sales. By design, they cannot factor in condition, recent updates, or specific circumstances that make one home worth significantly more or less than the one next door. Egmont uses a straightforward example: a home with a brand-new kitchen, new furnace, new central air, new roof, and fresh paint will command a higher price than an identical-sized home untouched for 20 years. An automated estimate based on square footage and comparable sales may not reflect that gap.
The reverse is also true. She recently worked with a seller who had seen a $900,000 automated estimate on his home. When Egmont assessed the property in person, she valued it at $750,000; it shared a driveway with two other homes, backed up to a parkway, and needed interior updates. The seller insisted on listing at $849,000. It sat on the market for six weeks and ultimately sold for $749,000. “Right where I said it needed to be,” she said. “If you overprice it, people are going to look past your house.”
Egmont does not include automated estimates in her listings, preferring to price from current comps and a direct property assessment. Her pricing strategy is built around creating urgency. She typically lists on Monday as “coming soon,” meaning buyers cannot schedule appointments until Thursday. Open houses run Saturday and Sunday. By Monday, she usually has enough offers to move forward – often well over asking. “When buyers see value, it creates urgency. When there’s urgency, it creates a multiple-offer situation,” she said.
The key is value. Buyers in Fairfield County are active but informed. They watch every new listing, price drop, and day a home sits. A home priced too high signals that something is off, and once a listing goes stale, it is difficult to recover. “The issue with a house sitting on the market longer than it should is that people start to think there’s something wrong with it,” Egmont said. “Even if there isn’t.”
Egmont emphasizes that pricing is not a one-time conversation. “Pricing is a moment in time. If a seller comes to me in January and wants to list in the spring, I’ll give them a price now, but we’ll revisit it before we go to market. What sold six months ago may not reflect what buyers are doing today,” she said. That means looking at comps from the week before launch, not the season before.
For sellers tempted to anchor to an online estimate, her advice is consistent: use it as a starting point for a conversation, not a price tag. Then bring in someone who has actually been inside houses like yours in the last 30 days. “That’s why you need a real estate professional to come and look at your house. There are things you can do to increase value. There are also things that will hurt it. Zillow doesn’t know the difference,” she said.
More detail on how Egmont approaches the listing and pricing process is available at kristinegmont.com/process.
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