How Much is My Home Worth

The first question that needs to be answered when you are considering listing your home is 'How Much Is My Home Worth'. There are four different ways that you can derive a valuation for your home, but only 2 of them are accurate and only one of them is free.

Your first option is to engage the services of a Realtor to perform what is known as a 'Comparative Market Analysis'. Here a Realtor will use their experience and the MLS to come up with a market valuation. The calculation incorporates many different criteria based on 'comparable sales in the area', and adjustments for 'number of bedrooms', 'finished / unfinished square footage', 'garage spaces', 'lot size', 'number of bathrooms', 'condition of home', 'level/quality of finishes' etc. Once a value has been calculated from comparable sales, market / human factors need to be taken into account. These include, how long are homes staying on the market, how many homes are on the market, are prices going up or down, does the home owner have a timeline (do they need to sell fast or are they prepared to wait) etc. An experienced Realtor with use all these criteria to come up with an accurate valuation, and they will do it for Free.

Request a Free Home Valuation for your home from a McDonald Group GMAC Realtor.

In addition to the use of a Realtor, there are also several web sites that claim to automate the home valuation process. These sites can give an accurate valuation, but not in the State of Utah. Utah is a non-disclosure State, which means they cannot gain access to the raw home sales data needed for the calculation. Any Utah property valuation given by one of these sites is likely to be highly inaccurate and should not be used as a basis for your homes value.

Another option for obtaining the value of your home is to engage the services of a home appraiser. For a few hundred dollars, an appraisal company will perform a visual inspection, resulting in a written valuation report. The resulting valuation is usually very accurate.

The last option is for you to try and calculate your homes value. If you want to try and calculate your home value then here are some things you should consider:

• How much did comparable homes sell for in the same area as your home? Because Utah is a non-disclosure State, this really difficult to do without access to the MLS. You can retrieve some information from the county records, but these tax valuations are so out of date and inaccurate that they are next to useless. Without the involvement of a Realtor the only other way is to try and gauge a value from homes currently on the market. What you must remember, is that a listing price does not mean the home is worth that amount, what a home will actually sell for can be substantially different.
• What improvements have you made to your home that the other comparable's don't have and what is the added value of those improvements.
• What improvements have the other comparable's made to their homes that you do not have, and how much will these improvements impact your valuation.
• Do you or the comparable's have different features that will affect the valuation. For example, upgraded kitchen, wood floors, more or less garage spaces, views etc.

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