What is a comparable sale and why does it matter?

Comps are how property valuers + experienced buyers establish 'fair value' on a property without a market price. Method: identify 3-5 similar properties (same suburb, same number of bedrooms/bathrooms, comparable land size + house age, ideally same street or one block away) that sold in the last 6 months. Adjust each comp for condition + features differential. The cluster's median is the fair-value estimate.

Quality matters more than quantity. One sale of a near-identical property next door is worth ten distant comps. A single $1.5M corner-block sale doesn't anchor your $1.2M flat-lot purchase - even on the same street.

Where to find comps: state land records are the authoritative public source. Most listings portals also surface settled-sales for browsing, and a number of paid research desks aggregate the same data. Underlying signal is public; aggregation cost is the differentiator across services.

Comp-driven offer structure: walk into the negotiation with 3-5 written comps + adjusted-for-features values. Anchor the seller's expectation against actual market data, not their listing-agent's opinion. Buyer's agents do this every day; private buyers can do it too with an hour of homework.