If you plan to sell your home or are maybe just in the consideration stage, value is probably your primary consideration. And while it’s likely you already have an idea of what your home could sell for, getting an accurate market analysis would be critical to making sure you don’t risk leaving money on the table. 

You may have a realtor who can help you, but if not, the next most convenient thing is to get on the internet.  There you can search your area, get a sense of what similar homes are listing for, and draw at least a “ballpark” number.  But this would be just a first step.  Without further investigation, you could easily be off by as much as 10’s of thousands of dollars, particularly here in our coastal market.

Then you see it. You’ve probably seen it before, but there it is.  The Free Instant Home Evaluation button! Just click here.  Each public site offers its variation, and many brokers and realtors do as well.  We offer a free home evaluation on our site.  We don’t provide it instantly, but we offer one. We’ll come back to that later. 

Online instant home valuations can be helpful, but accuracy, depending on where you live, can be tricky, particularly here on the coast.  A city block here, a peek-a-boo view there, and you can be talking about serious money.   And what about that bathroom update or that professionally landscaped yard?  So again, if you are trying to find a range of value for your home, an instant online valuation can probably do that. But if you want an accurate valuation to determine a listing price, you will want to take another step.

Many factors go into a home valuation, including location, age and condition, recent sales of like properties in like neighborhoods, and then weighting the comparable properties’ specific differences.  Another significant factor in today’s market is the current interest rates coupled with the limited inventory that has been driving home prices up.   Every new sale sets a new comp in this type of market, so it is also essential to be current.   

If you want to find your home’s approximate value in our coastal area, an instant electronic valuation may get you relatively close.  But if your goal is to price your home without leaving thousands of dollars on the table and yet stand up to a lender’s appraisal, you will want someone qualified to put eyes on your property. 

All of this brings me to my final point. 

When you see an offer for a “free” home valuation, that is what you will get from everyone, including us. Nobody will charge you for a valuation on your home because we all want to talk to you personally about helping you sell it.  So, while “free” sounds nice, the downside of the instant electronic valuation is you will have to give up (at the very least) your email address, and you are not going to get enough information to price your home accurately. 

For the record, this is how it works with us.  If you request a home evaluation from us, we will need your contact information and for you to tell us a bit about your home.  We will guarantee that we will do a full comparative market analysis based on your home location, the number of bedrooms, baths, square footage, lot size, etc., and get back to you with 24 hours with an “approximate” value.  But that is the best we can do without seeing your home ourselves. We can get a lot closer than a Zestimate, but we still need to put eyes on it to make an accurate recommendation on a sale price.  And here’s the thing. It’s the best anybody can do without seeing your home.

If you are thinking about selling and want a recommendation for an accurate asking price on your home, we would love the opportunity to talk with you about that.  You can start by going to our home valuation page, or you can just give us a call.