How to value your home – steps to take

What is a home valuation?

It’s an estimate of what your home is worth, based on many factors, that will help you with deciding on a price at which you’d like to list your property for sale, whether that’s through an estate agent, at auction, or through a company that buys houses and flats.

Who can do home valuations?

Many people turn to estate agents to do valuations, because they are familiar with all of the many steps involved. You can typically have an estate agent perform a valuation for free, because they benefit from this by having the potential to get you to sell through them.

However, an increasing number of homeowners are performing their own valuations. You don’t have to be a licensed professional to do a self-assessment of how much your house or flat might be worth, although it can require a fair amount of time and work.

What steps are involved with doing my own home valuation?

A good early place to start with doing your own valuation for your home is to get a sense of the price at which other properties in your neighbourhood have sold, or are selling.

You can visit local estate agents and browse the listings in the window to see how much homes are selling for in order to get a sense of how much your house might be worth.

Another option is to visit a property website like Zoopla that has a tool for generating a quick rough estimate of how much your house might be worth. These tools work by analysing a large collection of existing data on your property and the surrounding area, including historical sale prices, to generate a predicated sale price. While this can be useful as a quick general guideline, be aware that you shouldn’t rely solely on online valuations. The websites that offer these free estimates sometimes are working with very old data, meaning the valuation might not take into account the effect of increases or decreases in property prices by your home.

The HM Land Registry is a great resource for finding out how much properties on your street have sold for in the past. The HM Land Registry is a non-ministerial UK government department that houses information on properties throughout England and Wales, including details on how much homes have sold for in the past. You can enter a specific address and get information the exact sale price, among other details.

Next, it’s time to assess your house to generate your own valuation. You’ll want to make a list of all the attributes, both positive and negative, that your house and the surrounding area has that could affect the eventual sale price.

There’s a lengthy list of factors that you need to account for, including but not limited to: the location of your home, how big your house or flat is, the total space that you have available for storage in your property, local crime rates based on publicly available information, the risk of flooding at your home, whether the house has any significant structural problems like subsidence, the quality of schools in the immediate area, public transportation options, and more. The list is almost endless, signalling just how much work a self-evaluation can be.

Several online tools are available to help you assess the general value of some of the above factors, so take your time to conduct adequate research as you put your valuation together.

Be sure to account in your valuation for any work that you have done to enhance your property’s value. This can include steps you’ve taken like renovating a room to increase its size, or overhauling your bathroom or kitchen, or even any additions that you’ve made to the property while owning it. All of these improvements can help to push the total value of your home even higher.

But you should also include in your evaluation any negative costs, such as the potential price it might cost a buyer to treat a problem on your property. For example, if your house is suffering from subsidence but you do not have the time or money available to fix it before selling, your buyer will want to reduce their offer to account for the funds they’ll have to spend to treat it. Adjust your valuation accordingly so that it’s a fair reflection of such costs.