One of the most common questions I get is about how to estimate the value of your home. Here is a quick video showing you how we do it here at Homeowner Help Today.
Video Transcription
Ross: Hey, guys. Ross here, coming to you from homeownerhelptoday.com. I wanted to show you a quick video about how we estimate the value of your home here in Atlanta, GA.
How Did You Determine How Much My Home is Worth?
Now, this is a question that I get a lot from homeowners and from sellers. When we’re going over our offer and you say, “Ross, your offer sounds good, but we’re just not sure how you came up with that value. How do we know that you’re not trying to low ball us or anything like that?”
That’s a very fair question. There’s probably a lot of people out there trying to be greedy and trying to make low ball offers on homes. That’s certainly not us. I just want it to be as transparent as possible and show you guys how we come up with the value for your home.
Zillow For the Win!
Okay. You can see right here on my screen that we use a free tool that’s available to everybody, Zillow. I put in up here in the search, a great place to live – Stone Mountain, Georgia. I’m not going to zoom in on any particular home, but let’s say that your property that we are talking about is somewhere near Downtown Stone Mountain.
I’m just going to keep zooming in until we find a particular street or area. Okay, so let’s say that you live right here on this street, Pine Rock Drive, this is your neighborhood. I’ll show you exactly the way that we come up with the value, quick and easy, using these buttons right here across the top.
Search Recently Sold Homes in Your Area
First thing, I don’t want to look at houses that are for sale (and don’t use the Zestimate!). That has a lot of factors that go into it. What I want to look at are the houses that have recently sold. I’m going to unclick this red button and click the yellow one. You can see there’s a lot of homes that have sold in this area recently so we should be able to narrow this down pretty easily and accurately.
Price
The next box says price. I usually don’t put any parameters on the price right away, so we’re just going to leave that one blank. Bedrooms and bathrooms, let’s say that your home is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home with 1500 square feet, something that’s very typical for our area and something that a lot of people are looking for. We’ll put three bedrooms and two bathrooms in there. Click Done.
Square Feet
Next criteria, so it is a house that we’re talking about – not a condo or an apartment or a town home, so we’ll just leave the houses box checked. This has a lot of ways to narrow it down, but I usually leave them all open except for this one, which is square feet. Your home is 1500 square feet so we’ll say minimum 1250, maximum 1750 to give us some search parameters.
Sold in The Last….
I usually leave all the rest of these open until we get down to the bottom that says Sold In The Last. You can see there’s a lot of options here. The more narrow we make this within the last week or two weeks, the more accurate it’s going to be, but it’s also the fewer results we’re going to get. Let’s start with 30 days and see what we get.
Check the Search Results
Okay. What we’ve got are two homes that have sold in your area in the last 30 days. One is this house, it’s a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house with 1434 square feet. And then this one right here, which sold for $178,500, it’s a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house with 1568 square feet. Both of those were pretty good, except one has an extra bathroom, this first one, and the other one has an extra bedroom, this one right here. Those things are going to influence the value of the properties.
Let’s see if we can find one that has three bedrooms and two bathrooms and is close to 1500 square feet. We can do that by zooming out a little bit. So let’s zoom out, let’s see what we get.
After Repair Value
All right. We got this one right here. $147,000 that sold for on June 12th. Today is June the 21st so that was nine days ago, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1332 sq. ft. That’s pretty good. And then that one we’ve already seen. Oh, and then… Okay, right here. Boom – three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1500 sq. ft, right on the nose, sold for $140,000, 13 days ago on June the eighth.
These two right here are pretty good. We’ve got $147,000 and $140,000. Both of those within about a mile of the property that you have. That’s where we’re going to start, right around $140,000 to $147,000. We call that value our after-repair value.
Don’t Forget About Repair Costs
The other thing that goes into determining our offer and the value of your house is how much is going to cost for repairs. This is something that is not as easy to get an estimate on. There’s a lot of things that can go into repairs. A lot of houses need a new roof, some need new floors, new siding, some have termite problems, or all of the above.
There can be a ton of stuff that go into repairs. But this is how we get the after-repair value, which is what we estimate that the home will sell for on the open market after it’s all fixed up and nice.
Done and Done!
That’s a quick and easy way to get a value, an after-repair value on your home using Zillow. This is not a professional appraisal, but just a quick way to get a ballpark estimate. All right. Thanks, guys. As always, if you have any questions, hit me up at homeownerhelptoday.com. Take care.
Ross