Price that house

What this game actually is

Price That House is a five-round guessing game built on closed sales, not listings and not estimates. Each round shows one home that actually sold between Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street: the street it sits on, how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has, its interior square footage and its lot size. You move a slider to the number you think it closed at, lock it in, and the sale price is revealed along with how far off you were. House numbers are stripped from the addresses while a round is live so the exercise stays a judgment call rather than a search.

The deck is drawn from Trevor's ARMLS IDX feed and currently holds 22 closed North Central sales across 85012, 85013, 85020, 85021. Every round links out to the listing record afterward, so nothing is asserted that you cannot go read yourself. It is a sample of recent closings rather than a complete market history, and every figure below should be read that way.

Why calibrating to a market this thin is hard

The North Central corridor is a few thousand houses wide and does not turn over quickly. In a subdivision where forty near-identical homes trade a year, a buyer can build a reliable instinct in an afternoon. Here the comparable set for a given house is often three or four sales, sometimes older than you would like, and rarely on the same street. That thinness is why buyers who price accurately in Arcadia or the Biltmore still miss badly on their first few rounds here.

The sample bears that out. Price per square foot across these 22 sales runs from $296 to $605, with a median of $448. That is not a tidy band. The spread comes from land, from irrigation, from whether the original ranch was restored or gutted and rebuilt, and from how close the house sits to Central Avenue, the Murphy Bridle Path or a busy arterial. None of that shows up in a bed-and-bath summary, which is exactly the information the game gives you.

How to read price per square foot against lot size

The most common mistake in the game is multiplying square footage by a remembered per-foot number and stopping there. In The Corridor the land is frequently worth more than the structure standing on it. The median lot in this sample is 0.31 acres and lots range from 0.09 to 1.01 acres, against a median interior size of 2,877 square feet and a median sale price of $1,290,000.

A practical way to play: start from the median per-foot figure, then adjust up when the lot is well above 0.31 acres and the house is modest, because that is a land trade where a future buyer is paying for what they can build. Adjust down when the square footage is large but the lot is tight, because in a neighborhood defined by mature trees and irrigated yards, interior volume on a small parcel does not carry the same premium. Compare pockets before you guess on the corridor map, and read the long version in the journal.

Sale figures come from a sample of recent closed sales, not the full market history. See recent sales.