When you first start considering selling your home, you may have a gut feeling about how much it has appreciated since you bought it. That gut feeling, however, is subject to a lot of forces: is the market in your area a seller’s market or a buyer’s market? Does your home need a lot of TLC or is it in move-in-ready condition? How hard are you willing to work in order to get a top-dollar offer and see it through to closing?
These questions are important, but they should be connected to some cold hard numbers, and there are at least three ways to get those numbers. Here are the ways to figure out your home’s worth using three different sources of potential pricing options.
Start With Free Algorithm Appraisals
Online, there are ways to get a free and instant home appraisal simply by visiting one of a variety of websites. These sites offer some form of the estimated value based on other recent home sales in your area and the similarity between your home and those other sales. These estimates can be either wildly off, due to something skewing the data, or quite accurate if all the relevant details about your home are available.
If you’ve done substantial work on your home since the last time it sold, or if anything major is needing repair, you should mentally adjust for these factors, since the free home appraisal sites don’t have a way to know if you’ve made these changes since it last sold. Still, these can be a jumping-off point for you to use when talking through pricing strategy.
Look Into Cash Offer Companies
Another source of more focused pricing is to look at companies that buy homes for cash. These may be big national brands or local house flippers and resale companies who are hoping to do a bit of work on your home before effectively selling it for a profit.
Because they need that profit to make their business model work, they will most likely offer you somewhat less than you could potentially get from a transaction through a real estate agent, who would look for residential or investor buyers for you.
That being said, the simplicity of the cash buy process leads many sellers to consider these lower offers as a good deal given how much less time and headaches come with the process.
The price you get from these cash offer companies is also a valuable benchmark: if the price is only a bit below the algorithm appraisals, your choice looks very different than if they are offering you a much lower price than home value estimate sites think you could command.
Talk to a Real Estate Agent About Pricing Strategy Options
When you shop around for a real estate agent, having an interview before signing up to work with them is always a good idea. While you won’t get an in-depth evaluation during the interview, you can definitely bring up your concerns about how much the home could potentially sell for and pricing strategies that are being used in your neighborhood: are people setting high prices and seeing them, or are high priced homes languishing on the market for a long time?
By getting a feel for the range in which your agent believes your home will sell, you can decide whether or not a cash offer you already considered is worth enough to skip the typical sales process. If they see a high potential payoff, however, working with a top real estate agent may be the best way for you to go.
Checklist For Selling Your Home For Cash
Provided by Wait! Read This Before You Sell Your House for Cash