Knowing how much your home is worth matters even if you are not planning to sell your house. When you have a good idea of the fair market value of home, you also have the upper hand in other processes such as refinancing, insurance premiums, home equity lines of credit, and annual property taxes. All these processes are based on determining home value.

Often, people only bother to find out their fair market value when they want to sell their house. There are different types of companies out there who buy houses or who are in the business of helping you sell your house. All of them promise to help sell home fast. But before deciding on a specific company to do business with, You should know, or at least have an idea, of how to determine fair market value of home and how much your house is worth.

How to Find The Value of Your Home?

Here are 4 ways to determine the fair market value of house:

  • Use Online Valuation Tools
  • Home Appraised Values
  • Research Like a Professional
  • Estimated Value of Home

Use Online Valuation Tools

There is numerous fair market value calculator available online. They are usually provided by lenders or real estate sites. They make use of public records such as deeds of ownership, proper transfers, and tax assessments combined with some mathematical modeling to predict your house value based on recent listing prices and sales in the area. These are called automated valuation models or AVMs. But when using these tools, keep in mind that they’re set to return a value for just about every property despite having limited data, and in the process, the accuracy becomes less.

Home Appraised Values

Real estate professionals and lenders use different tools to measure your fair market value home. The AVMs they used have a confidence score that indicates how close the AVM provider deems an estimate is to market value. For example, a 90 percent confidence score means the estimate is within 10 percent of market value. These AVMs are generally more accurate than free online valuation tools offered by real estate sites. Nonetheless, it is recommended for you to talk to a local real estate expert to have more in-depth insight into any online valuation.

cincinnati house buyer home appraised values

Research Like a Professional

You can research on your own by checking the price of comparable homes sold within the past 6 months. Comparable homes mean those similar to your home’s size, location, condition, and upgrades. Can obtain this information through your local assessor’s office. Some towns or cities even have this information available online on their websites. It can provide you a ballpark figure of your house value.

Estimated Value of Home

Another thing you can do is to browse a website of MLS listings, so you can find the current fair market value is only based on the price of similar homes in the area. If you can’t find enough current sales, check listing prices but consider that they might not be realistic. You have to have at least 3 valid comparable houses to develop a likely range of market value for your home.

Once you’ve selectable comparable homes or “comps,” things begin to be more complex. You will have to adjust to accommodate the differences between your home and the comps. For example, you have to add value to your home if yours have more bedrooms than the comp, or subtract value if your house’s interior is outdated. How much you subtract or add will depend on your market’s conditions, which can vary a lot. After adjusting values, check the highest and lowest comps–somewhere in the middle is a rough estimating property value.

Conclusion

You don’t want to sell a house that is significantly lower than its real fair market value of home. This is why you need to know the real value of your property, especially when you are dealing with cash house buyers. Want to know how much you can get for your house from a cash buyer? Get a ballpark offer from a reputable company like The Cincinnati Property twins.