So What’s Your Home Worth?

In real estate your property is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it based on its condition and location. As you can imagine that presents some unique challenges when determining price. There are quite a few ways at looking at the value of your property so lets explore some. Putting too much stock into one of these categories can spell disaster for your sale. Only after careful consideration of the properties condition & location can ALL of these be used by your Realtor to determine the best pricing strategy for you property.

Zillow: One good thing about zillow is they offer what they call the “Zestimate”. Before you get all excited, in a good or bad way, about what you see there on your house let me explain a few things about the zestimate. For starters Zillow & Truilia both get their data from real estate companies and this is part of how they determine their estimates along with county records. The main problem with this, and the reason why your numbers are probably either too high or too low is not all companies send their info to zillow! As you can imagine, not having 5-10% of the data can have huge impacts on their numbers.

Local Market knowledge: The one thing no website or computer can ever replace is local market knowledge. A good Realtor knows the streets and how close shopping is, hospitals, local restaurants, public transportation etc. We are the ambassadors for our communities because we live there. Knowing things like which streets are busier than others allows us to make the fine adjustments to property values that a computer just can’t replicate!

Condition: The overall condition of your home has a massive impact on value. If a room hasn’t been updated in the last 10-15 years then its out of date already and will potentially effect the overall value of your property. Figuring out which updates and repairs to complete to maximize your homes value is vital. Call us a couple months before putting it on the market and we can help build a list of things to tackle in order to maximize your value.

MLS Sold Data: This is the heart of what we look at when determining the value of your home. If we are lucky enough to find very comparable homes that have sold over the past 3-6 months we can much more accurately determine a likely sales price. This ties the location and condition in together. A typical search looks back six months and either a few blocks to a mile away with the same bedroom and bathroom count. This can usually get us pretty close and adjust from there.

RPR: Realtor Property Resource (RPR) is a program offered to Realtors from our local multiple listing service (MLS). RPR looks at comparable, county records & adjustment sliders to help pinpoint potential value. In our experience it tends to be much more accurate than Zestimates.

Appraisals: While this is the least likely to happen, we do run into sellers who prefer to have an official appraisal ordered. Licensed appraisers look much more in depth at the same data we do to determine value. It’s not a bad option to have second set of eyes but beware the cost as it will likely run you around $500.00