Selling your home? It’s time to take the blinkers off!
How much do you think your home is worth?
Most people have a number in their heads, but it’s usually based on hot air and hope!
It’s time to get real and take a logical approach to a very emotional journey. I advise getting stuck into some serious research to settle on a figure that someone’s likely to pay. After that, you’ll know the budget for your next property.
I know what you’re thinking: looking at my home dispassionately is incredibly hard! That’s true, and real estate agents can inflate the price to get your listing. Their advice is valuable, just not in isolation.
Step One
Jump on the real estate sites and look back at recent sales of properties with similar attributes in your area and surroundings. Start plugging all the data into a spreadsheet, and a picture will start emerging.
Say you’ve got a three-bed, one bathroom, one parking semi-detached house. Find all of those recently sold, but dig deeper and ask yourself a bunch of questions in relation to your property:
How big is the land size compared to mine?
Is the kitchen and bathroom older or newer?
How big are the bedrooms?
What’s the street like?
Do they have easier access to shops and local amenities?
And so on.
Step Two
Analyse Google Maps, which will show you whether a street is busy or not (it shows up yellow if it is), and you can also scan to see what sites surround the property. Investigate transport links and whether the homes are in a good school catchment area. That might not be relevant for you, but it is a big deal for some and impacts a sale price more than you think. Add all of that to your spreadsheet.
Step Three
Find out what the council and the state government are up to in your area because there are all sorts of changes and incidents of the government overruling local councils so they can build more homes to meet their quotas. The NSW Planning Portal is an excellent place to start (NSW Planning Portal | Planning) but be aware that the information could change tomorrow.
Now, you’re starting to get a realistic idea of what your property is worth. Yes, it might be quite confronting! But it’s much better to go into your next purchase with your eyes wide open before you set your heart on a property you can’t afford.
Make sure to put your newly acquired knowledge to good use when it comes to deciding on which real estate agent to use, as a good agent will happily debate why, or why not, those properties are relevant when it comes to deciding what they think the property is worth. Be sure to use your critical thinking and don’t get lured in by a higher price recommendation, however tempting it is. ( Not only because what the agent is doing there is called ‘buying a listing’ and is illegal, but also because you’ll save yourself a lot of stress later down the track…)
Oh and one final thing - please do not bother with those online property price calculators, you know from one of the big banks for example… Why? Because those valuations ( with very wide price ranges… way more than the OFT guide of 10% variance) tend to be widely inaccurate most of the time as they are produced through a set of algorithms and tend to not take things like the above into consideration.
There’s plenty to consider when buying and selling property. Contact our friendly team if you think a realistic vision of your next move would help.