Determining Your Home’s Value

Real estate agents can do this work for you, with no commitment to actually use them to sell your home. They’ll hate for me saying this, but it’s a fact. Doing a competitive market analysis on your home is a free service that they provide to win your business. If you’re smart you’ll get three or four real estate agents to do a market value of your home and provide you with a target home value to list it at.

Its important to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how much you’ve personally put in the home when determining your home’s value. Prospective buyers don’t care. They are simply going to compare the price of your home and its amenities to other like homes on the market. Trying to recoup your home improvement investments in a falling housing market is a fools errand. Before listing your house for sale in a down or falling housing market you need to come to grips with the fact that you may very well not recover your total investment in the home. If you don’t accept this possibility up front you’ll never sell it.

Prospective buyers will only pay what they think is fair market value. The good news is, however, it only takes one buyer to sell your home.

Pay for a House Appraisal to Determine Your Home’s Value A more expensive alternative to getting a free competitive market analysis from a real estate agent is to hire a house appraiser. They’ll give you a price that may be a bit closer to reality to the actual selling price. In addition, they’ll most likely determine your home’s value more in line with a buyer’s mortgage lender appraiser. If a buyer’s mortgage lender’s appraiser feels the buyers are purchasing a home at too high of a price, you may have only one of two miserable choices; either lower your sale price to the bank appraiser’s value or walk away from the deal. So, again, it is extremely important to list your house for sale at a fair market price if you ever expect to sign a Purchase and Sales agreement on it and have a bank provide the buyers with a mortgage.

Look at Local Tax Assessments to Determine Your Home’s Value

The last way to determine your home’s value is to compare the town’s assessed value of your home to other similar homes that have sold recently in your town. With this method you can easily do a ratio analysis to determine a fair list price for your home.