VIDEO DIALOGUE

Your tax assessment is not your value.  Your Zestimate, Zillow’s thing, that’s not your value either. Want to know how to get the actual value for your property? I can save you this whole video right now: Talk to a live person, specifically a real estate agent who knows the market and can work with you to find it.  Why, pray tell? I’ll tell you.

I’ve covered this topic a lot because people always ask, again and again, and I think that’s because there are a lot of ways to look at value.  You can see a picture of your value in the houses selling around you, if you get on Zillow they can give you an estimate, but neither of these factors in any improvements that you’ve done, or haven’t.  You can hire an appraiser to come and tell you how much your house is worth, but for one, the way they look at value is much different than the way your house may appear on the marketplace, and two, that appraisal is only good for that moment in time.  Will it be good in six weeks?  No.  Will it show you the value you expect? Eh? Want to talk about Tax Assessments? Don’t even ask, those aren’t looking at anything close to market value. Which is what you should be concerned about if you’re thinking of selling.

Now, the fact is, all of these things are showing you some semblance of your property value. They are important to note. But what a REALTOR can look at, that none of these things is going to tell you, is how your house will sell based on your current market activity and pricing.  Meaning, an appraisal – especially outside of a sale – isn’t looking at your value in terms of what a person will pay for it, only what other people have paid for things around you. And the difference here is that you, or those other homeowners, may have a property that is more or less desirable because of certain improvements that may or may not have been made to increase or decrease the value.

This gets into a world of information we’re not going to cover today, but I have covered in the past, in terms of easy ways to increase your home value for a maximum return. But the thing to note here is that the market value of your home is based on what the market will bear. And that is something no one but a real estate professional can tell you, because we’re listing and selling real property every day.

Zillow, Opendoor, these places that are offering to buy your house from you quickly and easily, they are basing their value on what the market is doing, hard data, but they never enter your home to establish the price. Now when they make an offer, their margins are thinner than a normal investor, but they’re HGTV-style flipping those houses.  It’s not a Flip or Flop quality, but because they still have to sell it, they’re not offering you real market value.

My challenge to you is to look at your home from the perspective of a person that wants to live in a neighborhood just like yours. Someone that wants a house with the same number of bedrooms you have. And they may not have the same taste or style, but they need the same floor plan, it just works for them. It may not work for you anymore, but it’s perfect for someone.  And that person is probably looking for your house right now.  Because I’ll tell you, the market has far less supply than it has demand.

Whether you can get more, or less than you think for your house, wouldn’t you like to know what that number should be? A broker price opinion is really the best way to find marketable value for your house.  It all depends on your unique situation. Get your numbers from Zillow and every other easy tool you have, that’ll get you in the ballpark.  But if you want to put your house up for sale, you should call an agent to find out exactly what you should list for. I know it’s something I do totally for free, for clients and for folks that don’t know me from Adam. REALTORS are people too, I know I am.  Good luck out there.  Answers are only a phone call away.