Receiving my new assessment last week -- which you read about here -- has me thinking about home values and what our little spot on the map is worth.

Actually, I'm thinking more about how one gets a real idea of what that spot is worth. It's a theoretical discussion, I know, and one that's hypothetical because I'm not planning on selling at the moment.

But I decided to look up some former residences on Zillow.com and compare the values there with the assessments on the City of Milwaukee Web site. The differences were striking.

For example, in 1924 my great-grandfather bought a 24-year-old home on the southwestern edge of Walker's Point and raised my grandfather there. He, in turn, raised my mother there and my cousin spent much of his youth there and I lived there for seven years, too. No denying, we got a lot of use out of that place.

When it came time to sell, values weren't high. So, I wasn't surprised to see it is currently assessed at $55,000 by the city. But I was a little surprised that Zillow took that assessment, presumably, and sales data and came up with a value of $99,000 instead. Nearly double! And at a time when the market is down.

If this is the kind of conflicting information out there, it's no wonder the world of real estate is in its current condition. Well, that and the mortgage crisis, of course.

I also noted that although my childhood home in Brooklyn is assessed at more than triple the value of my current home, the property taxes on both were about the same in 2007. But that's another blog.