Estimating Home Value

              For Sale by Owners or Realtors®

What is the Price of Your Home 

Correctly pricing of a home is the most important step in sales of any property. With many online estimators by real estate related websites like Zillow and Redfin offering their version of how much your home worth, finding real value has become more complicated for consumers.  While Zillow’s tool, Zestimate, covers a larger market but it has been lacking accuracy and most of the time has been notoriously undervaluing the properties.  This is mostly because Zillow does not have direct access to the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) and mostly uses the county records or data driven from real estate brokerage websites.  Redfin, on the other hand, covers significantly fewer market but boasts on their accuracy, which is through the use of data by the MLS.  All this has resulted in confusion for both home seller and home buyers.

As a result, we have been receiving many comments from both buyers and sellers when it comes to our estimation of value for the properties they wish to buy or sell. because of that we have to educate them regarding the market condition and most importantly the compatible properties (Comps) rule that we use in determining home values.  Depending on websites algorithm has been the biggest downfall of these websites in valuation of homes.  This is mainly because there are many other factors involved in pricing a property, which are not considered when using a formula.  The most important variables like the market condition, estimate of value for homes with more or less bedrooms, homes with different sizes and amenities such as pool are not factored in such algorithms.

The best solution for both home buyers and sellers still remains in working closely with a real estate professional.  Our team has created a unique and unparalleled  approach in appropriately pricing properties.  We use the expertise of a former property appraiser, along with the data from the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) for homes sold by Realtors® and county tax roll data for homes sold by owner (FSBOs).

For buyers it is an obvious choice because typically the Realtor® services for residential home purchases are free of charge for buyers because seller pays the commission.  For sellers, on the other hand, use of a professional in marketing, negotiating and following up with issues like appraisal, inspection or multiple offer situations are well worth the cause.  This is especially true when it comes to the price of homes sold by owners compared to sold by Realtors®.  According to www.realtors.org the price of a typical home sold through Realtors® is at $249,000 while For Sale by owners (FSBO) homes sold for only $210,000.  This is a $39,000 difference lost by FSBO sellers that tried to save a $14,940 commission, which they had to pay if their home was sold by a Realtor® a nest loss of $24,060.