Free home evaluations and their benefits

A real estate agent works in the field on a daily basis and thus is well-positioned to evaluate your home based on current market trends. You’ll essentially learn two things – how much your home is worth and what you can do to raise the value of your home. These are essential benefits of free home evaluations.

This is essential information to have when you’re preparing to either sell your home now or in the near future. All too often, people put their home on the market without doing their homework. This usually results in the home being listed at a price that’s not going to fit with a healthy strategy to sell the home quickly and at a great price.

Furthermore, a seller often has an emotional attachment to the home which can interfere with a rational approach to setting the initial sale price. This can cost you money in the end – a lot of money. This ties in nicely with the article I wrote about how the market does its thing, which you can find here.

To do an evaluation properly, an agent should start by measuring your home properly. Yes, you might have the plans of the home, but you’d be surprised at how many plans don’t actually reflect the proper dimensions of the home. What buyers are interested in is living space, and that’s best determined by measuring properly.

Once the home is measured, all areas of the home have been visited and careful notes have been taken, the agent can then compare the home to other similar homes. Here, it’s important not to simply compare with homes that are currently on the market, as they would be listed and asking prices, but to also find comparable homes that have been sold in order to have access to actual prices paid. See, the prices paid at the final sale, can be 5 to 20% less than the asking price.

Especially those sellers that don’t involve a neutral third party, often come up with asking prices based on no facts at all. Those are thus wishful thinking rather than informed decisions. Once a price is fixed based on proper comparisons, you’ll be in a great position to start your selling strategy on the right foot.