House Price Comparisons

Obtaining house price comparisons is an important step you must take before listing your house on the market for sale.

You can find out the value of your home one of two ways:

1. The preferred method is called collecting "comps" or price comparisons. This is obtained by searching the MLS (multiple listing service) in your area and gathering information from that database. You will need prices of similar houses for sale currently AND homes that have sold recently.

You should compare houses with similar square footage, age of home, upgrades, size of lot, # bedrooms/bathrooms.

A real estate agent will provide this service free of charge in return for listing your home.

There are a few free mls search sites. www.zillow.com is the easiest to access. Another one is propertyshark.com (cut and past to your browser.

2. Another method is to do a tax appraisal search. Many county tax offices provide online records of tax worth and estimated market value. You can do a search by address and find your value and the value of neighbors. The down side to this is that it is an estimate and not the actual list prices or sold prices.

How NOT to figure your list price: Calculate what you paid for the house PLUS the cost of all your upgrades. If you overpaid for your house (or had a horrible interest rate or balloon house note) and the upgrades that may put your cost way over what you can actually get for the house. Especially if you "upgraded" on things like a swimming pool which you will only get 20-30% back on your investment.

I hope this article helps you decide your house fair market value.

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