What's your Putnam County home really worth?

An automated estimate works by finding houses like yours that sold recently nearby, and adjusting. In a subdivision where four hundred homes share six floor plans, that is a solvable problem and the models do it well. Putnam County is not that market.

The comparable sales are thin. A street here might produce one sale every three years. When a model has to reach two miles and eighteen months to find something comparable, it is no longer comparing — it is extrapolating, and the error bars get very wide without ever being shown to you.

Well and septic don't appear in the data. Most of this county is unsewered. Whether a septic system is five years old or thirty-five, whether the well runs dry in August, whether the property could pass a current perc test — these swing a sale price by tens of thousands and none of them exist in any public record a model can read.

Acreage is not linear. Lot sizes in his closed transactions run from an eighth of an acre to 159 acres. The second acre is not worth what the first was, the tenth is worth something different again, and whether a parcel is subdividable — wetlands, frontage, slope — can double its value or zero out the premium entirely. Models multiply. Land doesn't.

Condition is invisible. Two houses on the same road, same square footage, same year built, can be ninety thousand dollars apart on kitchens, roofs and basements alone. No model has been inside either one.