How to Sell My House Fast

How to Get a Free Home Evaluation

If you are trying to sell your home, the ultimate goal is to get the best price available to you in your ideal time frame. This means if you’re trying to sell your home fast, getting an accurate appraisal of your home is going to be integral to the process. The best scenario is if you can get a trustworthy free home valuation so you can move on to the other details of selling a house in any market.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

How to find out what my home is worth?

The most popular question in residential real estate is: “What is my home worth?” The answer to that question is much more art than science. There are dozens of down and dirty algorithm driven tools that are available for free by punching that very basic question into any search bar. However, that question isn’t the question homeowners should be asking. The real question is: “What Is The Most Amount Of Money That The Greatest Amount Of Buyers Would Be Willing To Pay?”.

The reality is that a home is worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay. If you are willing to wait long enough and advertise hard enough, you might eventually get someone to pay far more than the bulk of the buying public otherwise would. On the other hand, in an overheated market you might find a great number of buyers willing to offer far more than a banks appraiser could prove based on recent sales comparables.

Sometimes homeowners really just want a ballpark estimate of value out of curiosity. Sometimes they need to sell quickly and need a concise price for which a home could be quickly sold. On occasion, a person needs to know exactly where a bank appraiser would likely set the value of their home, if they were pursuing cash out financing, or purchase financing. There are also times when a homeowner needs an appraised value to assist their financial planner in managing their portfolio.

We’ll detail the best ways to use all the tools at your disposal in order to find out what your house is worth. Learning about these could be the difference in tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of stress relief.

What is the best home value estimator?

A real estate appraisal is a tool banks use to prove a home is worth the amount of money they are lending. An appraiser is someone who is trained at looking at the various features of a home and comparing it to other homes which share similar features, and have recently sold. They typically consider the homes age, size, location, amenities, and condition. Understand that an appraisers work product isn’t an analysis of what a buyer would pay. Only a licensed Realtor, who works with buyers, is a market expert, and has performed transactions in the area recently, will be able to accurately predict the actual market value of a home. If you need a valuation for a home loan, refinance, or estate valuation, an appraisal is the appropriate tool. Typically an appraiser can be hired by individuals for a fee of about $600.00.Positive or negative, planned or unplanned – a quick home sale will always have associated stress in the process. Our goal is to minimize that as much as possible by detailing what to do in the most frequent quick-sale situations.

What are some ways to estimate the value of a property?

There are innumerable, free, online tools for real estate valuations now. Popularized by Zillow and made mainstream by every iBuyer and discount broker on the market. These tools operate using sophisticated algorithms to analyze the prior sales in the area. In terms of speed and getting a general idea of value, there may be some validity to this – but even that is not a guarantee. Here’s a direct quote from the Zillow website.

“The Zestimate is not an appraisal and it should be used as a starting point. We encourage buyers, sellers and homeowners to supplement the Zestimate with other research such as visiting the home, getting a professional appraisal of the home, or requesting a comparative market analysis (CMA) from a real estate agent.”

Additionally, most sophisticated local real estate agents will have access to a tool for a free valuation that is similar to one of these apps. They will use it as a baseline, but adjust for real-world elements that are not contained in most data sets.

Getting your home to stand out can create huge percentage increases to its eventual sale price. An algorithmic approach to appraising and selling your house will only be able to take a limited set of variables to come up with a best fit number. This is especially troublesome as real estate markets change in value quicker these days, and the additions, upgrades, lot premiums, view characteristics, and charm of your house may not be factored in.

Ultimately, getting a comparative market analysis from a licensed professional real estate agent is still best. If your house needs some adjustments to up the value significantly, they will let you know, where an instant appraisal will not. If your house has historical value, this will almost never be factored in. Home buying and selling still relies on a great deal on human emotion and subjectivity, and the technology will probably never understand the art of selling your unique home.

Comparative Market Analysis

Another way to understand your home’s unique value, in a specific point in time of the market, is to perform a competitive market analysis. Also known as a CMA, this form of analysis, when performed by an experienced local expert, will provide a sales price range that is most likely to result in a successful sale. The process will begin with a tour of your home. This is necessary for the Agent to itemize all of the unique selling features of your home, its age, condition, upgrades, size, challenges, and strengths. The Agent will then review other homes which have sold in the area and tour those that are currently on the market. Next, the agent will arrange these properties in a report comparing each property to yours. The agent will make adjustments of value to the recent comparable sales. For instance if your home has more square footage, the Agent will add price value to the comparable to make its final sales price equal to your own. Likewise, if your home didn’t have a pool, and the comparable did, the Agent would reduce the sale price by the market appropriate amount. The end result after all of the additions and subtractions in value when comparing your property to the recent sales will result in a value range that your could reasonably assume would equal market value of your property.

Zillow Zestimate

Though we advise against solely relying on a Zestimate, it does have its place in the basket of resources available to the average home seller. Zillow is the original and most prevalent consolidator of home sale analytics. Therefore, they have tremendous market presence and are considered a household name.

Historically Zillow was just a marketing site that attempted to capture the attention of the buying and selling public with the hopes of capturing their information in order to sell it back to Real Estate professionals in the form of a sales lead. Recently Zillow moved into the Ibuying space. The premise of the Zillow platform today is to capture the prospective sellers information and either convince them to sell directly to Zillow or again sell this information to real estate agents. It’s a no lose proposition for them. If they buy your home, they’ll do so at a price that it could then be resold for profit, or they make money selling your lead to Agents.

You and your agent can use this information to begin your CMA, and use it as a backstop or sanity check on the value range you determine. Remember that even the most precise evaluation will yield a likely range of value rather than a specific sales price. When performing your analysis you should always look to use every tool at your disposal for selling your home, so don’t hesitate to include iBuyer platforms and sophisticated real estate algorithms, but just make sure they are a balanced part of your valuation plan.

How to Value a House

We have detailed the different methodologies of home valuation that you can use, but it is also important that you, the seller, understands that an Agent works for you. Part of their job is to educate and inform you of the market fundamentals and your homes place in it. However, the final decision on sales price is yours. If you have the right Agent, nobody will work harder than them to get if for you. As a reminder, here is a summary of your valuation options.

Use a Free Online Tool: We recommend using this as your first step in home valuation because it will usually give you a rough approximation of value.
Get a CMA: Along with your online valuation, you should have your agent create a CMA and let them weigh how to market your house. If a quick sale is the goal, consider using the low end of the Agents proposed value range. Most Agents will perform a CMA for no charge assuming you will use their services should you choose to sell your home.
Hire a Professional Appraiser: This step is required only for obtaining purchase financing, refinancing, or proving value in estate planning. Appraisers are not trained in assessing what a home will sell for, rather what other homes similar in nature have sold for. An Appraiser’s services can be acquired for a fee of approximately $600.00.

How can I find out the value of my home for free?

Use iBuyer evaluations and algorithm driven analytic tools for free to determine a ballpark estimate of your home’s value range. When you need a more specific and accurate value of where your home would most likely sell ask your favorite Licensed Realtor to perform a competitive market analysis (CMA).

What percentage of realtors offer free home evaluation?

With instant appraisal tools in the market, it has created a higher standard for traditional agencies as well. Over 80 percent of local real estate agents provide free calculations at this point in time, and we recommend speaking to one when you need a specific and accurate home valuation.

Find the best price for your home with Century21 Northwest

Century 21 has been serving the greater Phoenix area for over 45 years. We work to serve our clients needs by driving speed to sell and the best closing costs in Arizona. However, we are here to serve you and promise to always put your needs above our own.

If you are looking to get the best price for your house with the fewest days on the market, reach out today. We would like to connect you with a local market expert who will be happy to perform a free home valuation.