Use Appraisals and Comps to Determine the Value of Your Home

Price your house using a number of criteria including what local buyers will pay for a house similar to yours.

Baltimore Real Estate- Maryland House Buyers: Determining the value of your home may be a challenge if you’ve never done it. If you are selling the house on your own you will need a solid reference by which to create a good asking price. The price you place on the house is significant and should be put in place when you put it on the market. Since it is not a good practice to change the price of your house once you set the price, take care to get it right the first time.

The price of a house is the single most important selling factor these days. The way you will set the right price is by using the numbers given to you by the appraisal you’ll have done and the amounts you come up with by doing neighborhood comps. This may sound complicated but it really isn’t once you know how each works.

Don’t overprice it or under-price it for best results.

The appraisal will be done by a professional. It will cost you a bit of money to get it done and the amount will depend on where you live and what the typical cost is there. The extent of your efforts in the appraisal end when you’ve made the phone call and chosen the appraiser you want to use. They do the rest. The appraiser will visit the home and look around, on top, under the foundation, and at all the systems in place, and then you’ll receive a number. The number is the price that the house is worth according to the appraisal results.

Your more labor intensive task will be to figure out the comps. Comps are comparable properties within a half mile or so around your house. Look at all homes that have the same basic square footage, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and other features. Find out what those similar homes have sold for in the last 3 months, or you can go back as far as 6 months depending on how quickly home prices have fallen in your area. The comp price you’ll come up with is an average of the comp homes that have sold, which may be different than the current market values.

The bottom line for setting your price should be determined by what you think you can get for the house, not what you or anyone else thinks it is worth. Look closely at what local buyers are willing to pay for a home like yours and price it accordingly.

CityHomeBuyers.net is Peter Gauthier, a Real Estate Investor that buys and sells houses like kids trade baseball cards in Maryland Prince George’s Maryland! If you have a home that you need to sell, contact us to see how we can buy your houses in 7 days or less and close when you want!

To see if your house would qualify for our fast home purchase program, please complete our confidential home seller questionnaire on our website at CityHomeBuyers.net