What Exactly Is a CMA?

By Dar Walden

Dar Walden and her team are recognized as the leading real estate professionals in Alaska, consistently setting the standard for excellence in the industry. Dar is celebrated as one of the top five agents in the Northwest region and ranks among the top 50 agents with Keller Williams worldwide. She has also been honored in the Top 500 by Real Trends and named one of the Top 500 Marketers of the Year by the National Association of Expert Advisors—a distinction awarded within a highly competitive field of over a million agents nationwide.

Sometimes as agents we get a little carried away with our acronyms and assume everyone knows what they are. We want to peel back the curtain a little bit and talk about what a CMA is.

CMA stands for competitive market analysis. The goal of a CMA is to establish a range of values for your home. We start by pulling all of the information we can find about your home and doing a walk-through to see what condition it is in.

After that, we come back to the office and look at the other properties in your neighborhood. We compare your home to homes with similar floor plans because those are going to be the ones that the appraiser will base their decision on. Here in Anchorage, the most valuable homes are the single-story ranch home, followed by the traditional two-story, then the reverse two-story, and finally the split-entry.

Once we’ve looked in your neighborhood, we zoom out in your local area and look for comparable properties sold at that scope as well. We zoom out one more time and again look for those similar properties. If it’s hard to find properties that are like your home, like if it’s a hillside home, then we have to widen the area that we’re looking at even more.

With all of these similar properties gathered, we can sit down and pencil in your home price. Many agents today will do CMAs through the MLS, where they just have to press a button and it will spit out a value. That’s not how we do it at the Dar Walden Team. We hand you all of the data we’re looking at because we think that’s fairer to you.

When the CMA is finished, we’ll call you in, give you a range of values, explain how exactly we came to that decision, and talk about what might fit you best. If you want to get your home sold or you have some questions, feel free to give us a call. We would be honored to help you.