Guess What? This Home is Worth.....

When Buying, Selling or Fixing Up Your Home, How Much Does a 'Guess' Cost?

How much is your home worth? Did putting in that privacy fence increase its value?

If you plan on doing improvements to your property, wouldn't you want to know what the current market return on your dollar investment is? Is it worth adding a 4^th bedroom? Should you spend $8k on new windows? Will you get your money back? A real estate agent SHOULD be able to answer this for you.

An agent can find an answer by asking a colleague or review numbers that an appraiser gave them a couple of years ago. In most cases, this can be a good enough solution. But it's still just a guess.

If you're okay with guessing, then I guess that's okay. But when investing in your home or selling it, guesses shouldn't be good enough. You need an agent who will put some research into it.

Figuring out the over-all value of a home is tricky business. Seems easy enough, but what if your house is a Ranch style home in a neighborhood of Split Foyers? Or what if your lawn has in-ground sprinklers and no one else in your neighborhood does? What 'value' can you place on these differences? 

Every agent has at their fingertips a vast database of information. It's called the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). An expert agent knows how to run data through this system to isolate the current values of everything from toilet stalls to garage stalls.

As an example:

An average can be obtained for sold prices of homes similar to each other that have one full bathroom and no more.  Let's say the average sold price is $150,000. Then the same analysis can be performed for homes with two full bathrooms (no more, no less).  Let's say the average sold price now is $152,500. By comparing the two average sold prices, we can confidently determine that the value of adding an additional bath is $2,500. 

This same procedure can be done on any number of other factors, additions or improvements.

This process can help home buyers as well as home sellers and even help home improvers! If you plan on buying, selling or doing some work on your place, don't guess at value, call an expert agent to help.

-John Maurer
THE AGENT