Computer Research Helps Sell Your FSBO One of the most efficient ways to assess your home’s value is to take a little research trip on your computer.
Typically, you can physically go to the courthouse in your city, find the property tax office, and ask to see the property taxes for your surrounding neighborhood. And if they had time to do this, maybe ask them for a recent property tax and market appraisal for the surrounding properties in your neighborhood.
That would always turn out to be a long drawn out procedure and hopefully through all of this you could find friendly employees to help you out. But if you wanted an easier and faster way to accumulate this same information, just go to your computer, go to Google (you’ve heard of them, right?), then type in the name of your county and state, along with the words , property tax records.
YES, your county has a website, it will appear on the screen. If so, click the link and go there. Now you’ll have access to all sorts of amazing information about your county’s tax record.
You can usually search for tax and other information by name, address, or a couple of other criteria. Type in your address and the next screen you see should show you all the properties on your street, along with who owns it and other relevant information. Click on your home’s address or name again, then you’ll be taken to a page that lists all sorts of additional information about your property, such as your estimated market value (what the county estimates your property is worth, that multiplied by the county mileage rate, the tax rate, should equal what you are charged in property taxes for the year).
Armed with this information, you would first call your county tax office and ask the clerk when the last assessment was done in your area of the county. If they tell you recently, then that market value should be pretty accurate; However, if it’s been a while, then I would do a couple more things.
Type in your Internet browser, the URL address: http://www.zillow.com and type its full address in its search box and hit enter. You will then be taken to an amazing site with a picture of your house in the middle of the screen, surrounded by all the other houses in your neighborhood, surrounding it.
Then you’ll realize that what you’re seeing on the ceiling are numbers, preceded by a $. They all represent home values that Zillow.com believes are the approximate values of those homes at current prices.
Before you go out there and put up the ad and put up flyers all over town, keep in mind that these values may be overestimated by Zillow, because they make these estimates to the best of their ability, but come close to them from a national value view (otherwise words, typically, what national sales should be selling for, per square foot, and then add a little leeway for your given area). Some real estate sellers refer to this method as a WAG (Wild Guess).
While, some people may claim that Zillow.com has been around for a long time and has been successful for a long time as well, which suggests to me that they can’t be that far off, as a starting point.
So here’s my best take on taking values from this source: write down all the value of the home, in your subdivision that you think measures up to the quality of your home. Put those values on the left side of a piece of paper, on the right side of that piece of paper put the appropriate square footage of each home (these figures are obtained by hovering over each home and letting it rest, then the numbers will appear ).
I suggest you take at least ten, if not more, home prices and their corresponding square footage numbers, then simply add up each column and divide by the total number of homes listed on your list. Now do the same for the numbers you find on the right side of your paper (the square footage of the houses, added and then divided by the number of houses you have listed).
Now, the penultimate step in this process, divide the median home value number (on the left) by the average square footage (the number on the right) and that will come up with the median price per square foot of all those houses. you have listed in front of you.
Finally, armed with that number, simply multiply it by the square footage of your own home, and that formula will produce the approximate list price for your home.
If the ten (or more) houses on your list averaged $145,000.00 and your ten houses averaged 2400 square feet, then: $145k divided by 2400 square feet. feet would be = $60.42/sqft
So if your house is 2,650 square feet, then 2,650 times $60.42 would equal = $160,113, or about $160,000.
If it were me, I’d reduce it by a factor of 5% (due to national values vs. local values): $160,000. X 95% = about $152,000.00
This should probably put you pretty close to the real estate listing market value for your local area. But expect to lower the price of your “ask price” even further in a BAD ECONOMY, which we have been going through, in recent years.
Realistically, in a bad economy the housing market has been seeing “normally accepted sales prices.” drop as much as 5 – 10%, from the listing price. If the market is good, you can expect to get between your full list price and up to 5% off the list price.
A good or bad market is a factor you need to find out and the ONLY way is to consult a banker, they may know, or a REALTOR, or even a mortgage broker, they may know.
Usually they will be happy to let you know, but usually the banker will not tend to inflate the market as much as the others (they have less vested interest in the bottom line).
There are many other factors to help sell your home yourself, but those are for a different day and at a different time… Good luck!