Reading a Seattle CMA Like a Pro: A Seven-Point Audit

A comparative market analysis arrives as a polished packet with a confident number on the last page. Most people read it back to front: number first, evidence never. Pros read it the other way — because a CMA is an argument, not a measurement, and arguments deserve cross-examination. (If you need the basics first — what a CMA is and how comps work — start with the plain-English explainer and come back.)

Here’s the audit. Seven checks, in the order a sharp reader runs them.

1. Interrogate the comp selection before anything else

The conclusion was determined the moment the comps were chosen. For each comparable, ask: would a buyer considering my home genuinely cross-shop this one? In Seattle that question has teeth — a townhome is not a comp for a single-family home even at identical square footage; a different school catchment or a busy arterial versus a quiet street can break comparability within three blocks. One mismatched comp out of five can tilt the whole range.

2. Check the time window against the market’s speed

Six-month-old comps are fine in a flat market and dangerously stale in a moving one. If prices have been shifting, recent-but-slightly-worse comps beat perfect-but-old ones. Ask whether the agent time-adjusted older sales, and how.

3. Read the status mix — it encodes the market’s direction

A strong CMA shows three layers, and each answers a different question:

• Solds: what buyers actually paid (the evidence).
• Pendings: what the market is accepting right now (the freshest signal — sale prices unknown, but the speed of going pending speaks).
• Actives: your competition, i.e., the prices currently failing to attract offers.

If actives sit above solds, that gap is either a rising market or a row of overpriced hopefuls — the pendings tell you which. A CMA with no actives at all is hiding your competition from you.

4. Audit the adjustments for false precision

Adjustments — dollars added or subtracted for a bedroom, a garage, a view — are judgment dressed as arithmetic. Two sniff tests: do the adjustments run in sensible directions, and are they so large that the “comparable” wasn’t comparable to begin with? When a comp needs heavy surgery to match your home, it’s the wrong comp. Seattle classic: an extensively remodeled house adjusted against original-condition sales, or vice versa — condition gaps swallow whole adjustment grids.

5. Demand the range, distrust the point

Honest comp sets produce ranges. If the packet collapses straight to one number, ask for the spread and where in it the recommendation sits — and why. Then ask the strategy question, which in Seattle is unavoidable: is this number designed as expected value or as a list price meant to generate competition? Those can be tens of thousands apart by design — the list-low playbook is standard practice here — and you should know which game is being proposed before you bless the number.

6. Ask for the velocity context

A price recommendation without market-speed context is half a recommendation. Two numbers complete it: how fast homes like yours are absorbing (a trailing absorption rate on your true competitive set, not the whole city), and what comparable sales ran as a sale-to-original-list ratio. Together they tell you whether the recommended price will be met with a stampede, a trickle, or silence.

7. Name the agenda, kindly

Every CMA has an author with an incentive. A listing agent competing for your business faces pressure to flatter (“buying the listing” with a number the market won’t pay — you find out via price cuts six weeks later). An agent writing an offer for you may shade conservative. None of this makes anyone a villain; it makes the evidence pages matter more than the conclusion page. If two agents’ CMAs disagree, don’t average them — find the comp set they disagree about and decide who’s right. An AVM makes a useful third opinion for triangulation, no more: here’s what Zestimates can and can’t see.

Run the seven checks and the packet stops being a verdict and becomes what it should have been all along: a dataset with a point of view.

You’re auditing the price opinion — audit the fee while you’re at it. Manaky Homes is a free marketplace where Greater Seattle agents publish their fees side by side, so the comparison takes minutes instead of phone calls. Join the waitlist for first access.