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The Comp You Pulled Up Was Already a Bad Sale A comp is only as good as the sale behind it. And some of the sales feeding your estimate were never clean...
A comp is only as good as the sale behind it. And some of the sales feeding your estimate were never clean to begin with. The number looks like evidence, but the story underneath it is the part that tells you whether to trust it.
This matters most on acquisitions, where you're building an offer around three or four recent sales and treating them as the floor. If one of those sales was a mess, your whole number tilts. You just can't see the tilt from the spreadsheet.
A bad comp isn't a low number. It's a number that came from circumstances you'd never repeat.
Think about a Franklin home that sold between family members, priced to settle an estate rather than to meet the open market. Or a house that closed in three days because the seller took the first cash offer to move for a job. Those are real closings with real dollar amounts, and they'll show up in your pull looking exactly like a normal arm's-length sale.
The MLS doesn't flag "the sellers were in a hurry" or "the buyer was the tenant who already lived there." You get the price and the date. The reason is missing, and the reason is usually what moved the price.
A handful of sale types distort comps more than the rest, and they're worth knowing by name because they keep reappearing.
Off-market and pocket deals close without ever competing for buyers, so the price reflects a private agreement, not demand. A sale with heavy concessions, where the seller credited the buyer several thousand toward closing or a rate buydown, shows a contract price higher than what actually changed hands. And a flip that sold with cheap finishes to an investor can read as a market sale when it was really a quick exit.
None of these are fraud. They're just sales that happened under conditions your deal won't share.
Pull three comps on a street in the Westhaven area and you might get three genuinely different houses. One backs to green space, one faces the main road, one got a full kitchen redo in 2024. Same subdivision, same square footage, and the real spread between them is wide.
Older parts of Franklin, closer to downtown and the areas around Columbia Pike, are even trickier. Lot sizes vary, some homes sit on land that's worth more than the structure, and a 1990s build next to a renovated 1920s cottage will produce two comps that shouldn't live in the same analysis.
The further a neighborhood sits from a clean tract of identical builds, the more each comp needs a human to look at it. In Franklin, that's most of the map.
Read the days on market first. A sale that closed almost instantly either came in under value or came with a backstory, and both are reasons to dig before you lean on it.
Then look at who bought it. A sale to an LLC, especially one that owns nearby parcels, often signals an investor or a landlord expanding a position, and those buyers price differently than a family moving in. Pull the listing photos if you can still find them, because finish level explains more price gaps than square footage does.
Finally, check whether the sale had concessions baked in. The recorded price and the net-to-seller aren't always the same number, and the gap is exactly the kind of thing that makes your offer land high.
More comps feel safer. They aren't, if half of them carry noise you can't account for.
Three sales you actually understand, where you know the condition, the buyer, and roughly why the price was what it was, give you a tighter and more honest range than ten sales you pulled by radius and date. The wider net just averages the distortions together and hands you a number that feels confident and isn't.
This is the part of acquisitions where local knowledge earns its keep. At Redbird Real Estate, the comps we hand a buyer come with the context attached, because the price alone was never the point. We'd rather tell you a sale down the street should be thrown out than let it pull your offer in the wrong direction.
Leave it out. A sale you can't make sense of isn't neutral data sitting quietly in the background, it's a thumb on the scale.
If a closing looks too low and you can't find the condition or the circumstance behind it, don't split the difference and keep it. Either track down the story or set it aside and build your number on the sales you can defend. An offer you can explain line by line is one you can hold firm on when negotiation gets tense.
That's the real work under a good acquisition. Not pulling comps faster, but reading the ones you pull honestly, and knowing which sales were never worth comparing to in the first place.