How to price your property just right

Pricing your property will require some work

The first step in selling your house is figuring out what it’s worth, because this price will perhaps be the deciding factor for interested buyers in whether to proceed with a purchase or not.

You can either have a professional value your house, or you can try to do it yourself. Either way there will be some work involved, and there are pros and cons of both approaches. But the amount of time and money that you might end up spending on assessing your home’s value and deciding the right price can make the difference between it selling or remaining unsold.

Hear from professionals – but don’t rely solely on their advice

Local estate agents might be willing to visit your house and give you a free valuation, because it’s good business for them as they might be able to take you on as a client for selling your house or flat. But you shouldn’t accept the price they suggest right away, because the estate agent might be telling you an inflated value with the hope of convincing you to sell through them.

You could also discuss your property valuation with a qualified surveyor however there can often be a charge for this.

Doing your own work to assess your ideal house price

Whether or not you first get a quote from an estate agent or mortgage lender or other licensed professional, you should then do you own work to further assess your ideal sale price.

You might have heard of free online property valuations, and these can be a good way to get a general sense of the value of homes in a certain area. A leading example is the property website Zoopla that has a tool where you can enter your home address and within seconds it will give you a price estimate, typically presented as a range rather than a single number.

But you should know that these online home valuation tools are essentially calculators that make their projections based off a host of data, including past home sales in the area and more. This information can sometimes be quite out of date and therefore the estimate it gives you isn’t exactly accurate. And an online valuation tool can’t assess any changes you’ve made to your home, for example extensions, or other features that might raise or lower its value.

You can also try looking on the website of the government department known as the HM Land Registry. This site has an impressive collection of details on properties registered in England and Wales, including exact sale prices. Look up houses nearby to yours to get an idea of how much they have sold for in recent years.

Your home price needs to account for positive and negative factors

When setting your sale price, you need to account honestly for both the positive and negative factors about your home so that you settle on a value that is fair. There are several free tools online that can help you assess the beneficial value of certain improvements you might have made to a home, including extensions or renovations. The value of these can sometimes help to increase your property’s worth quite significantly. But you must also take steps to assess any problems with your property that might reduce its value; issues like the presence of Japanese knotweed or if the house is starting to show signs of subsidence. If you do not have the time or money to fix these problems, you will have to assess how much it will cost to fix them and consider that in setting your final sale price. A prospective buyer must be made aware of these problems and will look to subtract the cost of fixing it from their final offer.