A Review of HouseCanary.com Property Reports - Not bad!

[Ryder Meehan]

A friend sent me a link to this new beta site for property analysis reports call HouseCanary.com.  I was a little skeptical since the market I'm currently investing in is a smaller town (Sherman, TX) and has less comps and robust sales data for most automated appraisals to work accurately.  For example, Zestimates are typically about 30% higher than what I would consider realistic.

Note: this review is only of their Value Report product: http://www.housecanary.com/product-value-report/

Upon visiting the site, it promotes $5 property reports and as cheap and skeptical as I am I was leery of letting go of that crisp Abe Lincoln I has been clutching in my hand but anxious to know if it could really be as good as the sample PDF report they offer was I gave it a go.

It required me to create an account and then much to my delight actually just gave me 10 free reports without ever entering any billing info!  This thing truly is in beta, there is actually no way to pay even if I wanted to - attempting to pay just lead you to a "please email us" page.

After creating my account I was prompted to enter the property address then I got a data preview with a link to "See Full Report" which then lead me to a robust report like the sample I had seen.  It was available in PDF and Excel formats for download as well which is nice.

The report gives a lot of comps and summarizes based on the comps.  

Here is their sample report: http://www.housecanary.com/assets/images/HouseCanary-Value_Report-SAMPLE.pdf

What I like:

- Attractive and easy to understand reports

- Market analysis is richer and more comprehensive than I have seen with any other tool or even been able to create in Excel myself

- 10 free reports is pretty damn generous, $5 for each report wouldn't be bad at all if I was seriously considering the property for purchase

- The "Nearby Properties" section of the report shows me how the sqft and lot size compare to others in the area, this is great so I know if my house is huge or tiny compared to average.  It also offers this for bedrooms/bathrooms but my county doesn't report that info so it's N/A.  Age of house is available too.

- Lots of cool ways to view the projected value of the property

What I dislike:

- Comps are too varied, I have a 2000 sqft house and it's included 600 sqft comps.  It also has some comps 3-4 years old.  I'd like some way to refine the variance of comps

- It would be nice to have links to see more data on each comp to see how similar or varied it truly is

- I'd like to see monthly plan, for those of us analyzing dozens of deals weekly it could get expensive fast but the $5/report a la carte price really isn't too bad.

Overall I'm quite impressed with the offering and value.  For my wholesaling business in Texas this is a great new tool in my tool belt with coming up with an offer price and marketing the deal to investors.