What Is a CMA & Why Do You Need One?

Long Island Real Estate Podcast with Karen and Joe Donovan

What is a CMA? Why do you need one? I’ll go over the entire comparative market analysis process for you today.

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This month I’m answering a question from Evan Resnick, the winner of our $25 gift certificate. Evan asks, “What is a CMA and why do I need one?”

First of all, CMA stands for competitive market analysis or comparative market analysis. If you want to know what your home is worth, you would ask a real estate agent for a CMA. Some owners might want to use online home valuation sites, but that is a mistake.

If you are buying a car or something like that, it’s pretty easy to go online, look at similar products, and set a price. It is not so easy when it comes to setting the value of your home. Those automated home values do not take the many upgrades you have made to your home into account. They also have no way of knowing what features your home has that other homes do not. The other problem is that those automated values only look at sold properties.


When a Realtor does a CMA, they will look at several different kinds of properties. They will look at sold properties because that gives you a history of what homes in your area have sold for. However, they will also look at properties that are currently listed for sale (your competition) and homes that recently went under contract. If a home just went under contract, that tells you that the property was priced competitively.

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Realtors look at many different properties during the CMA.

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Your agent will also look at homes that did not sell, which are called expired listings. If a listing expired, you’ll know that those homeowners were asking for more money than what the market was willing to bear. In short, the market didn’t support the price they wanted for the house, and you don’t want to make that mistake when pricing your own property.


Once the Realtor takes all of these properties into consideration, they will come up with a proposed asking price for your home. They will also give you a selling price so that you know what you can actually get if you decide to put your home on the market.

A lot of the time, people might not be able to sell right away but would still like an idea of what their home is worth. That is no problem. A Realtor can still come by, look at your home, ask a few questions, and put together a CMA for you. If you wait for a year to sell, you can look at that CMA and see if it makes sense for you to sell in that market.

If you have any other questions about finding your home value, please let me know. If you have a question you would like answered in our next video (and if you want a chance to win a $25 gift certificate), please submit it to [e-mail] or text your question to 516-822-1442.

As always, if you need any help in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We would be happy to help you!