Transaction & Market Activity

How many real sales
can you value this on?

This app does not tell you what a property is worth. It shows how many recorded sales exist nearby to support a valuation, and where there are too few. It uses the sales file the county publishes, and it marks areas with no sales clearly.

Example: Sacramento County, California · 55 submarkets Public county records only · no licensed data

The decision this helps with

Should you bid, and can you trust the value in front of you?

Say a submarket (the local area you compare against) had four commercial sales in three years, not forty. A buyer who knows that can price in the risk or walk away. The valuer can see up front whether there is enough evidence for a confident figure, or whether the report needs a material uncertainty note (a statement that the value is less certain than usual).

Both are questions about how much evidence there is, not about the value itself. The app answers the first and leaves the value to the valuer.

For: buyers and asset managers at funds, REITs and private investors Also useful to: the valuer they hire

22of 55 Sacramento submarkets had no recorded condominium sale at all in the period covered

Free price indices leave condominiums out, so they can't show this. Paid comparable-sales services give you a list of sales, but they don't tell you when the list is too short.

What is available today

Free sources give averages. Actual sales data is usually paid.

The RICS standard on comparable evidence splits it in two. Category A is direct comparables: actual sales of similar property. Category B is general market data, such as indices and published averages, which gives guidance but not a direct indication of value.

Source	What it publishes	Why it falls short here
FHFA House Price Index	Yearly price-change indices by county, ZIP code and tract	Shows how prices moved, not actual prices. Covers conforming mortgages only. Condos, co-ops, multi-unit and PUDs are excluded
Redfin Data Center	Monthly median price, price per sq ft and days on market, by ZIP and neighbourhood	Listed homes only (from MLS). No commercial, no vacant land, no off-market sales
Zillow research data	Modelled home values	A model estimate for homes. General market data (Category B)
ATTOM · Reonomy · CoStar	Deeds, mortgages and commercial sales, nationwide	Actual sales (Category A), but paid. They give you the comps list, not whether it is long enough
County assessor and recorder websites	Look up one parcel at a time; recorder searches often charge a fee	No way to see a whole area at once
Sacramento County "Sales by Property Type"	57,524 parcel records, each with a sale price, date, property type and location. Free and public	Actual sales, free, and rarely used

What the app checks

Seven qualities of good comparables. The app checks three.

The RICS professional standard Comparable evidence in real estate valuation (2019, reissued 2023) lists what good comparable evidence looks like. Three of these can be measured from county records. The other four need the valuer's judgement.

Quality	Checked here?	How
Enough of it: several sales, not one	YES	The number of sales in each submarket for the chosen property type
Recent: reflects the market on the valuation date	YES	The date of the latest sale in the submarket, and how many days ago it was
Similar to the property being valued	YES	Property type, sub-type and area, as the county records them
An arm's-length sale	NO	The county's deed codes can't tell a sale from a gift
Verifiable	NO	The standard says comparable data should not be taken at face value. Checking it is the valuer's job
In line with local market practice	NO	Can't be judged from a deed record
Driven by real demand	NO	Can't be judged from a deed record

When evidence is thin, the RICS Red Book expects the valuer to say so, and calls this "not an admission of weakness". The standard also asks that evidence be recorded clearly and kept on file. The app's export is made for that file.

Where free data is silent

Condos, commercial and land: the sales free data leaves out.

9,427 sales, 16.4% of the county file, are condominium, multi-family, commercial/industrial, vacant land or "other". The free price index leaves these out, and home-listing (MLS) data does not cover them. The 1,237 commercial and industrial sales are what paid services charge for.

Across four of these property types, 71 of 220 submarket and property-type combinations have fewer than five sales. That is about a third of the map.

Counts read 2026-09-03 and 2026-09-07

Evidence level across 55 submarketsDEEP · MODERATE · THIN · NONE

Commercial / Industrial1,240 parcel records · 1,063 sales 221878

Condominium2,078 parcel records · 1,976 sales 209422

Change the property type and the picture changes. Commercial sales are spread widely but thinly. Condominium sales sit in the urban core, and 22 submarkets have none.

DEEP20 or more sales

MODERATE5 to 19 sales

THIN1 to 4 sales. A valuer would likely need to disclose this

NONEno sale recorded, in an area the county does cover

These levels are the app's own, not a professional rule. The standard asks for "several" comparables without saying how many. The exact count is always shown, so you can apply your own threshold.

The app

"No sales" and "no data" are different answers.

Screenshot of the working app, 2026-09-07, with Commercial / Industrial selected.

Sacramento's sales file covers the whole county. So if a submarket shows no sales, that is a real answer: there were none. Outside the county we have no data at all. Showing both in the same grey would mislead.

NONESolid. We have the data, and no sale of this type was recorded here

NOT COVEREDDashed. 57 of California's 58 counties don't publish this file. Shown as no data, never as zero

NO MAP AREADashed. One ZIP code, 95836, has no Census boundary, so its sales can't be placed on the map

A dashed outline means missing data. A solid colour means a count.

A worked example

One parcel record is not one sale.

One deed can transfer many parcels, and the county file lists each parcel on its own line. If you count lines, the market looks busier than it is.

whole county file: 57,524 parcel records (read 2026-09-07)
but only 48,264 separate sales (deeds)
so counting records overstates the number of deals by 19.2%
vacant land: 3,975 records, but only 1,172 deals, overstated by 239.2%
one deed recorded 2025-01-30 covered 614 parcels vacant-land figures read 2026-09-03

The app counts each sale once, even when it covers several parcels, and shows that count next to the record count.

The exported evidence note: the submarket, property type and evidence level, the number of sales and parcel records, the qualifying sales with their prices, what was and was not checked, and where the data came from.

The export is ready for your work file. It lists the sales and their prices, the source and the date it was read, the area covered, and which of the seven qualities it checked. It keeps a copy of the sales, so your file still matches after the county updates its data.

How you use it

Pick a property type, then a submarket.

A submarket opened: the side panel shows ZIP 95655 Mather as THIN with one sale and its latest sale date, and the map zoomed to the parcel that sold.

Open a submarket and the map zooms in and lists its sales. Click a sale in the list to find that parcel on the map. Click a parcel on the map to find it in the list.

The list and the map stay in step, so a single deed in a large submarket is easy to find.

Property type: six types, each with its sale count. Switch type and the whole map updates. The arrow keys step through them.
Legend: click a level to hide it, or shift-click to show only that level. Esc clears it.
Submarket: click again to close it. Esc steps back one thing at a time.
Side panel: resize it or fold it away to see more map.

Where the data comes from

Why you can trust the numbers.

Straight from the county

All sales come from Sacramento County's published "Sales by Property Type" file. Nothing is modelled or estimated.

Every number is dated

The county updates the file often. It gained 167 records in four days. So each figure shows the date it was read.

Screened by the county

Every record carries a documentary transfer tax, and 97.5% carry the assessor's flag that the sale is usable for appraisal. A valuer should still verify them.

99.8%of records are dated 2023 or later. The file holds roughly the last three years of sales, so it is not a price history. That suits RICS, which asks for recent comparables.

1 of 58California counties is covered: Sacramento. The other 57 don't publish this file and are shown as "no data", not as zero.

Limits

What this app does not do.

It gives no opinion of value. No automated valuation, no adjusted comparables, no estimated market value.
It is not the official assessment and not a title search.
No price trends. Almost all records date from 2023 on, so there is no history to show.
No price per square foot or per acre. Lot size is filled in on only 329 of 3,975 vacant-land records.

One county out of 58. Of five California counties checked, only Sacramento publishes sale prices in this file.
It does not judge whether each sale was arm's-length. One deed code covers 99.55% of records and can't separate a sale from a gift.
No owner names or personal data.

Use it for your market

Your sales records.
Your submarkets.

We need a file of recorded sales with a date, price, property type and parcel ID; the submarket boundaries you work with; and a note of the areas it doesn't cover. Setup takes about two weeks.

Fitted to your market: submarket boundaries, property types, the thresholds for each evidence level and the currency are all settings, not new code.

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