How to get a house valued without an estate agent
Selling a house can be a demanding process for any individual. That is because there are plenty of essential steps to complete before you can enlist your home as ‘for sale.’
These steps range from undertaking important repairs, such as replacing your tongue and groove flooring if needed, to cleaning the property to boost its price. However, the most crucial step you need to complete before you put your house on the market is evaluating it.
Valuating your house involves determining the home’s market value after considering factors such as age, condition, and location. Proper valuation of property is important for two main reasons.
- To avoid undervaluing the house
- To ensure the house gets a buyer faster
If the house is undervalued, it will attract more buyers faster, but you will sell it at a loss. Equally, setting an unrealistically high price tag can lead to less or no interest from buyers, meaning you may have your house for a long time in the market. Speak to a reliable estate agents like https://webuyhousesinatlanta.com/austell/ when trying to get an honest value on your home.
Typically, home sellers rely on the help of a real estate agent to evaluate their house before they enlist it in the market. While it may seem like a wise decision to let a professional handle the task on your behalf, you may be incurring some unnecessary costs. A real estate agent usually takes anything between 1-5% of the total amount of money you get from the sale of the property.
When selling your home, it is imperative to remain as cost-effective as possible. That is because you need to factor in unavoidable costs such as stamp duty, energy performance & removals and solicitor fees. Apart from that, you may need to consider other costs such as buying your next home, redecorating it, among many more tasks that require money.
Although some estate agents can help evaluate your property for free, you need to get the terms correct. For instance, getting their evaluation services for free may mean you have to let them market your property. Additionally, you may have to pay the real estate agent even if they are unsuccessful in selling your house unless you have a written ‘no sale no fee’ agreement with them.
But, do you really need a real estate agent while you can evaluate your home yourself?
How to Get a House Valued without an Estate Agent
Here are a few ways to get your house valued without the help of a real estate agent.
Online Valuation Tools
Using online valuation tools, known technically as automated valuation model’ is one of the cheapest and easiest ways. If you open your browser and search ‘how much is my house worth?’ you will stumble upon various home value estimators. These tools are often offered by real estate sites and lenders and can help estimate the right price to list your house.
Although they provide a comprehensive valuation of your house, it can be tricky to sell your home without the help of any property expert. As an ordinary homeowner/seller, you may have limited access to prospective buyers. Additionally, it may not be possible to use leading online property portals as most do not list individual vendors’ properties. Therefore, unless you have a buyer lined up, you should consider hiring a hybrid agent.
Use a Hybrid Agent
A hybrid agent provides a middle ground between using online valuation tools and a real estate agent. These online agents can help evaluate and sell your house at a fixed price, which is way lower than a high-end real estate agent. Some hybrid agents can even offer you free services and redeem their fees from other additional costs.
As they operate online, these hybrid agents will evaluate your home based on the data you provide them. Therefore, there is no physical appraisal with an online agent.
Evaluate Using Comparable Properties
Another reliable way to evaluate your house is using the data from recently sold properties similar to yours and are in the same location. To do this, you need to start researching your local property market, which may sometimes involve approaching the home sellers.
You may need additional data such as renovations and extension work completed on the given properties before the owners listed them on the market—research more information about these properties through planning authority websites.
All of the methods above can give a rough estimate of the value of your home. For better results, it may be advisable to combine the three techniques and get an average price.
