Rules & updates
Why tract-home comparisons miss country property
Pricing a house on ten acres from nearby tract homes values the house and mostly ignores the land. Cornload compares country property only with sales of homes on an acre or more, adjusts for acreage, house size, age, wells, septic and outbuildings, and shows the sales behind each number.
Cornload field notes · Checked
What goes wrong with tract comparisons
- Price per square foot rules. Subdivision sales are priced mostly by the house, so extra acres barely move the number.
- The land facts are missing. Wells, septic, barns, shops, usable acres and Williamson Act contracts rarely appear in tract-home data.
- Too few close matches. Country sales are scarce, so a search that looks for the nearest sales drifts into subdivisions.
How Cornload builds an estimate
- A model built on 1,553 sales of homes on an acre or more in six Northern California counties.
- It weighs house size, acreage, age, bathrooms, the county and town, and features such as wells, septic, pools, barns and shops.
- If the home itself sold in the last two years at a believable price, the estimate starts from that sale, adjusted to today.
- Every property page lists the country sales behind the number, leaving out the home's own sale.
How close it lands
In a fair test that hides each sale from the model and then estimates it, the typical miss was 13.9% and 66% of estimates landed within 20% of the sale price. That's why every estimate shows a range, and why a land specialist's walk-through comes next.
Checked Oct 7, 2026. Rules, programs and costs change. Confirm with the agency or a qualified professional before making a property decision.
Put the questions to work.
A Cornload Certified Land Specialist can help you check these details on a specific property.
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