Your ARV Is Probably Wrong — Here's How to Pull Comps That Actually Hold Up

Every flip lives or dies on one number: the After Repair Value. Get the ARV right and a mediocre rehab still makes money. Get it wrong by 10% and a great rehab loses it. And yet most investors source the single most important figure in their deal from a Zestimate, a gut feeling, or a quick scroll through "what sold near here."

A good ARV isn't a guess about what a house *should* be worth. It's a defensible estimate of what a *renovated* version of that house will actually sell for, built from comparable sales the way an appraiser — or a lender's underwriter — would build it. Here's the discipline behind a comp set that holds up, and why it matters double in a market as patchwork as Hampton Roads.

## Rule 1: Geography first, and tighter than you think

Location is the one variable you can't renovate. So comps start with distance, and the radius should be small.

Start inside **a quarter mile**. Only expand to **half a mile** when you genuinely can't find enough sales — and stop there unless the area is truly rural. Every block you travel outward, you risk crossing an invisible line that resets the price: a major road, a school-zone boundary, a subdivision border, a waterway.

This is where Hampton Roads punishes the lazy comp. Two houses 0.4 miles apart can sit in completely different price tiers because one is inside a sought-after subdivision and the other isn't, or one feeds a different school, or one is in a flood zone and the other is high and dry. A flat "half-mile radius" pull will blend all of that together and hand you an ARV that's confidently wrong. Respect the boundaries the buyers respect.

## Rule 2: Recent sales only

The market you're selling into is the market that exists *now*, not nine months ago.

Lean on sales from the **last 180 days**. Stretch to **365 days** only when recent inventory is thin, and know you're accepting more noise when you do. Older than a year and you're no longer comping — you're doing market history.

Two underused signals while you're at it:

- **Pending sales** tell you about *current* demand and where today's buyers are actually agreeing to pay. They're often more informative than a sale that closed five months ago. - **Expired and withdrawn listings** quietly mark the ceiling — the prices the market looked at and refused. If three houses tried to sell above $340k and all expired, that tells you something your ARV should listen to.

## Rule 3: Compare like to like

Distance and recency get you a neighborhood and a timeframe. Now the houses themselves have to actually be comparable.

- **Square footage** within a sensible band. A 1,100 sqft cottage and a 2,400 sqft two-story are not the same product even on the same street. Run a $/sqft sanity check and throw out the comps that blow up the average. - **Beds and baths** in the same range, with adjustments for the differences (more on that below). - **Same property type and era** — don't comp a 1960s ranch against new construction, or a townhouse against a detached single-family.

## Rule 4: Never trust a single comp

One sale is an anecdote. It might have been a cash deal between cousins, a divorce fire-sale, or a bidding war that ran $40k hot. Build your ARV on a **minimum of two** comparable sales, and you're far more comfortable with three to five. A tight cluster of several recent, nearby, similar sales is worth more than one "perfect" comp you fell in love with.

## Rule 5: Adjust for the differences

This is the step eyeballing skips entirely, and it's where most DIY ARVs fall apart. Comps are never identical, so you adjust:

- The comp has an extra full bath → adjust its price *down* before comparing. - Your subject will have a finished garage the comp lacked → adjust *up*. - The comp is on the water and yours isn't → that's not an adjustment, that's a disqualification.

Appraisers do this line by line. It's tedious, and it's exactly why "it looks like houses around here sell for about $300k" is not an ARV.

## What a disciplined comp pull actually looks like

Put those rules together and you get a *cascade* — a search that tightens or loosens in a deliberate order instead of grabbing whatever's nearby:

1. **First pass:** within 0.25 miles, sold in the last 180 days, similar size and type. 2. **If that's too thin:** expand to 0.5 miles and 365 days — but no further. 3. **Still thin?** Fall back to comps within the same subdivision, where the boundary itself guarantees relevance. 4. **Throughout:** require at least two comps, filter out anything outside a sane square-footage ratio, and adjust for bed/bath differences before averaging.

That's the methodology a careful investor uses by hand on a deal they're serious about. It's also, almost exactly, the logic Deal Sherpa runs automatically on every listing in Hampton Roads — the geo-cascade from 0.25mi/180d out to 0.5mi/365d with a subdivision fallback, a minimum comp threshold, a square-footage filter, and bed/bath adjustments baked in.

## The Hampton Roads wrinkle

The 757 makes all of this harder than a generic suburb. REIN MLS covers a string of distinct markets — Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Hampton, Newport News — that don't behave like one. Flood zones can swing value street to street. Military and relocation demand moves on its own cycle. A comp engine that doesn't know the local boundaries will quietly average a flood-zone sale into your high-and-dry ARV and never tell you.

That's the entire reason to do this with discipline instead of a Zestimate. The good news is you don't have to choose between *fast* and *right*.

## The bottom line

A trustworthy ARV is close, recent, similar, plural, and adjusted. Do that by hand and a single serious deal can eat an hour. Do it for every listing in your market and you'll never get through the volume — which is exactly why most investors fall back on the Zestimate they know is wrong.

Deal Sherpa does the comp pull on every property automatically, the same way you'd do it for the one deal you actually care about — so the ARV you're underwriting against is one you could defend to a lender.

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*Deal Sherpa builds defensible ARVs from live Hampton Roads MLS comps and scores every fix-and-flip deal in your market. [Start a free trial](https://dealsherpa.app) and stop guessing at the most important number in your deal.*