Your home's value and your walk-away number are two different things. Here's a Jacksonville-specific way to see what you'd really pocket
One of our favorite pastimes as homeowners is hopping onto Zillow, Realtor.com, or Redfin to check what our home is worth. It’s a lot like logging into your Schwab or Fidelity account just to see where you stand. Maybe you’re dreaming about a vacation home someday, thinking ahead to retirement, or wondering whether the numbers will come together for upcoming weddings or college. Checking your home value is part of that same financial gut check. It’s a way of asking whether all the pieces of the puzzle are going to fit.
Value and walk away are two different numbers. Here’s the piece most people miss. Knowing what a buyer, or really an algorithm, thinks your home might sell for is one thing. Knowing what you’d actually keep if you sold at that price is a completely different story. That walk away number is the one that matters when you’re planning your financial life, and it’s the one those value estimates never show you.
Generic calculators miss the local details. There are online calculators that try to estimate seller proceeds, but when we looked, we couldn’t find one built for our Northeast Florida market that reflected what actually happens in a Greater Jacksonville transaction. So we built our own. It’s the Pursuit Real Estate Seller Proceeds Calculator, and we have a separate version for buyers, too.
“What your home is worth and what you'd actually walk away with are two very different numbers.”
It’s built around the four county Jacksonville market. The tool does the work you’d otherwise have to look up yourself. You enter your price and watch the walk away amount update in real time. You can add your mortgage payoff, and for prorated taxes, it covers all four Greater Jacksonville counties: Duval, St. Johns, Clay, and Nassau. Each has its own millage rate.
Deed stamps, owner’s title insurance, and the settlement fee are all built in, so you don’t have to figure out who typically pays what. Whatever a seller usually covers is already set, though you can always negotiate something different with a buyer. The goal is a solid ballpark of your net, not an exact to the penny figure.
You can tailor it to your real situation. From there, you can fine tune things. Pick a closing date, since tax proration can change quite a bit depending on when you close. You can also enter your actual property taxes rather than relying on an estimate. If you bought for $250,000 fifteen years ago and you’re selling for $750,000 today, your current tax bill may look nothing like what a system would estimate based on the sale price alone, so you can adjust that case by case.
The tool even breaks down the smaller line items, including the settlement fee you pay the title company, a municipal lien search, recording fees, and, if you’re in an HOA, things like an estoppel fee and prorated dues. Add in any seller concessions or repair credits you want to plan for, and it totals everything into your closing costs and final net.
Here’s the part to know. This isn’t a public facing website, and that’s on purpose. We’re not trying to drive a bunch of anonymous traffic to it. But if you’re curious what your home is worth and, more importantly, what you’d actually walk away with, I’m happy to run the numbers for you and send you a clean PDF.
So if you’d like me to pull up your number, or you just want to talk through what selling might look like, reach out anytime. Call or text me at (904) 405-1995, email me at jeff@pursuitrealestate.com, or visit pursuitrealestate.com. I look forward to catching up soon.
