What’s my house worth?

With the real estate market as competitive as it now is, it has never been more important and achievable to be your own ‘property expert’. This may sound a little like a buzz phrase, but property buyers and vendors alike are quickly learning that there are real costs of not being informed about both local and national markets. The greatest benefit of knowing what your property is worth and where it fits within the market is simply saved time: no wasted Saturday mornings or time spent marketing your property to the wrong demographic.

But of course, becoming informed is only part of the equation to getting the most out of your property. The other half is working effectively with a real estate agent.

 

 

The process of working with a real estate agent when buying and selling property is more collaborative than it has ever been and often begins with a simple question: “What’s my house worth?”

As part of the process of buying and selling, or just to educate yourself about your local market, the first step is acquiring a property value estimate for your home. This is one step shy of having your property valued by a real estate agent or property valuation service. During a traditional property valuation, many variables are considered when valuing a property. Some of these include location, land size, depreciation, market trends, and attributes (bedroom sizes and quantity, bathrooms, car spaces, amenities etc.).

While a property valuation is the best way to accurately and effectively market your property, the sophistication of online property estimation tools has grown in recent years to now be an invaluable and accurate way to get an initial idea of your property’s value.

Using many of the same considerations as a property valuation, the property estimate tool at view.com.au looks at the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and parking available at your property (which you can update yourself) to then compare with similar properties within your local market. With the ability to play with these comparable properties to find those that best suit your own home (for instance, those that share similar amenities as your own house) you can create a highly accurate property value estimate in real time.

Recently refocusing its efforts on providing accurate property data to users, the website has made considerable changes to its user design and continues to update its features to help regular people increase their knowledge of local markets and their own homes. There are still improvements to be made to the user design of the tool so that users can quickly change the attributes of their property, yet the information provided is more detailed than some of the site’s competitors and finds a strong balance between its emphasis on providing a property estimate and providing detailed demographic data for a local market.

With changes to real estate pricing laws made in Victoria earlier this year, the property estimates available for homes within Victoria will become increasingly precise and this is most likely to continue throughout the country as underquoting is targeted.