Your home's value isn't one fixed number. It is better thought of as a range, shaped by the property itself, recent comparable sales, what else is on the market near you, buyer demand and the conditions you are selling into.
Some of these are the ones you would expect. A few are the ones sellers tend to underweight:
The words matter here more than they do almost anywhere else in a sale, because one of them is a regulated term.
A figure produced from data about your property and your area, expressed as a range and dated. It is free, it is immediate, and nobody has been inside the house. It is a starting point for planning, not a number to set a reserve from.
A local agent walks through the property, looks at recent comparable sales and current competition, and gives you their opinion of what it would achieve. It is free, it is informal, and it is not binding on anybody. It is usually the most useful number a seller gets.
A formal written report by a registered or licensed valuer, which is a regulated profession. Lenders, courts, family law settlements and tax matters rely on valuations; a sale usually does not need one. If someone has asked you for a valuation, they mean this and not the other two.
Get an instant appraisal A free online appraisal for your address, as a range, with the date it was produced and the local market it was produced against. Appraise my home
If two opinions of your home disagree, the interesting question is usually not which is right. It is which comparable sales each of them used, and why.
Any figure is only as good as what it can see. A renovation completed last year, a north-facing rear yard, a busy road at the end of the street, a body corporate with a known defect — some of that is in the data and some of it is only visible to a person standing in the room. That is the gap between an automated appraisal and one from an agent who has been there.
It also moves. An appraisal describes a market on a date. In a fast-moving suburb a figure from six months ago is a historical fact rather than a current one, which is why every number we publish carries the date it was produced.
Use a range to plan with: what you might walk away with, whether the next place is reachable, whether it is worth doing anything to the property first. Then get an agent through the door before you decide on a price strategy. Those are two different jobs and the second one needs a person.
Communities.com.au