The Internet has made it even easier than ever to check the price of your own home. Many people have been doing this over the last two years, as home prices have been massively rising. There are various real estate listing sites that will produce an estimated value if you were to sell the house.
But this isn’t like eBay. There’s not a button you can push to just instantly sell your house at that price. How accurate are these estimates? When you enter into negotiations with the buyer, should you use that price as a baseline at all?
It can help for comps
Perhaps the most valuable part of being able to see home prices online is that you can see which properties have sold in your area. You can then use these comps to get some idea of how much you would receive in a similar sale. But if all of the homes are selling for less than the estimated values, this tells you that those estimates are probably a bit inflated.
Real estate sites don’t have all the information
The other thing to remember is that an online real estate site may not have very much information to go off of. They’re just assuming that the home is still in the condition it was the last time the pictures were taken or an appraisal was done. But if you’ve lived in your home for 10 years and made all sorts of updates and changes, the value could be much different than if you had done nothing at all.
As you begin to look into selling your home, just make sure you know what options you have and how to proceed so that you get a fair value and the sale goes smoothly.