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.
Valuing your house or flat is selling has important implications for how many people might be interested in making an offer on it, how much profit you could make from the sale, and more.

If you set the price at a rate that is far above the average value of similar properties in the same location, you might find that many prospective buyers consider it to be overpriced and therefore they won’t even have an interest in a viewing to tour the inside and outside of the property.

It you set the price at a rate that is below your property’s actual value, you create the problem of reducing how much potential profit you could make from the sale, and perhaps even ending up selling at a loss or only just breaking even by selling at a price close to what you paid for the home originally. That will be a situation to avoid if you are attempting to sell in order to use the proceeds for resolving financial difficulty that you might be experiencing.

Keep reading to learn more about the steps involved with doing a valuation of your property, how making repairs might affect its potential sale price, and options for finding a buyer.

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.

How making repairs at your home before selling can change its value

In earlier sections, this guide has briefly discussed how a renovation or problem that needs fixing at your property might affect its value – and it can be helpful for owners a home in need of repairs to know more about whether investing in such work may be a good idea.

Some repairs are relatively minor such as fixing nail holes in walls or sealing windows that have a draught, as Compare the Market says. These small issues should not have any significant impact on the total value of your property.

But many problems with a house or flat can have a large negative impact on how valuable prospective buyers consider your home to be. Every home is unique and there is a long list of flaws that a property might have, with some common examples including a leaking roof, dry rot, damp, the presence of asbestos, high radon levels, subsidence and more.

As the owner, an important choice you will need to make is whether to invest in resolving whatever problem your home currently has before you attempt to sell it.

Spending time and money on fixing the problem first would have the benefit of eliminating a situation where a potential buyer either loses interest in your home entirely because of the problem, or they significantly reduce their offer price to account for the money that they anticipate it would cost them to fix the issue as the next owner of the property.

But the repair work might require many months and hundreds or even thousands of pounds to fully fix, which would be at odds with any owner that is trying to get either a speedy sale or to keep their costs low when finding a buyer, or both. If this applies to your situation then do not fear that you will not be able to sell your home “as is” in its current condition, because you still have some viable strategies available for getting a fair and fast offer on it.

One such approach is contacting a quick home buyer like LDN Properties, as these companies are experts at making swift and competitive offers on all types of leasehold and freehold homes even if they have major structural problems or any other negative elements, for example council tax arrears, noisy neighbours, legal battles over a right of way or other issues. You won’t have to pay a quick buyer any commission and the entire process should only take a few weeks.

The next section of this guide provides more detailed information about how to sell your home to a quick buyer, as well as advice on the pros and cons of other selling options.

Choosing which approach to use for selling your house or flat

Once you have settled on a value for your property, the next important step will be selecting a method you want to use for finding a buyer. The four standard options are selling at an auction, selling with an estate agent, selling to a quick home buyer, or selling on your own.

You will see from the specific details about all four choices below that they each have pros and cons in terms of whether they make sellers pay commission, their typical schedule, and more. Using an estate agent or selling without any help can both take more than a year in certain cases to find a buyer, whereas selling to a quick buyer will only take a handful of weeks.

Carefully review the information about your selling choices below – it can be useful to make a note of your main aims with the sale, including your ideal sale price, your willingness, if any, to pay commission, and how fast you want to secure a buyer. Comparing these factors against the specific details of the methods should help with discovering the most suitable for your scenario.

Selling at an auction

At an auction, people can place bids of increasing price on your home, and the highest value price at the time the auction ends is announced as the winner and therefore the buyer of your property. Your goal is to have many people interested so that the bids are pushed high and you make a decent profit – but you may get zero bids, in which case the home does not sell.

You’ll be asked to select a reserve price, which is the lowest value at which you agree that your house or flat can sell. Be sure to calculate a price that should generate a profit from the sale, even after paying the auctioneer their commission, otherwise you might only just break even from the auction or even end up selling at a loss compared to what you paid for your home.

The typical auctioneer has a rate of 2.5 percent of a property’s sale price, and this fee is taken out of the auction proceeds right way, which adds to your total costs. Check with individual auctioneers to find out their rate, as it might be below or above 2.5 percent.

The fee pays the auctioneer for their work, which includes creating and marketing a listing that features photographs of your home and describes its features, as well as hosting the auction itself and then overseeing the completion of the sale following a successful auction.

Expect selling through an auction to take many weeks or even months, starting with a long wait between when you select this approach and when the auction takes place. If your property sells, the buyer will then have to complete various tasks – such as signing the required legal documents – to finalise the purchase, and they usually have about a month to do this.

Selling with an estate agent

If you choose to sell your home using the services of an estate agent then you will need to pay them commission for the work that they do in searching for a buyer. This is often set within a range from 1.15 percent to 1.40 percent of a property’s sale price, although the precise charge can vary and it might be much higher or much lower than this range. The fee will increase your total selling costs because it will be subtracted immediately from the sale proceeds.

Estate agents put in a lot of effort to sell a property, starting with developing a listing and then promoting this online, in their office and in local newspapers, then arranging viewings and hearing offers from people, and finally getting a serious offer to the exchange of contracts.

You might want to consider a different way of selling if you want to find a buyer fast because this approach can take several months or even more than a full year. Speedier options for selling include choosing a quick buyer like LDN Properties, where the entire schedule should only be a few short weeks, and as an added bonus you will not have to pay any commission.

Selling this way includes the risk that someone makes a true offer on your home but then changes their mind and rescinds it, making the sale collapse. This would require that you then restart the search for a buyer, potentially adding much more time to the schedule. And unless contracts are already exchanged you can’t penalise the person that cancelled the offer.

Selling to a quick home buyer

Quick buyers, which includes LDN Properties, have the resources available to buy your flat or house immediately. They don’t have to wait to first get authorised for a mortgage to afford the property, a process that can take weeks or even months. As a result, the typical schedule for selling to a quick buyer is just a few weeks, covering every step from start to finish.

You’ll get a competitive and rapid offer on your home regardless of any negative issues that it might have, as these companies are renowned for making such offers on properties throughout the UK regardless of their age, condition, location, shape, size or type. And you don’t have to spend time and money on fixing the issues before selling as they’ll buy your home “as is.”

For your extra security when selling this way, ask specific quick buyers if they can prove they are registered with The Property Ombudsman (TPO). This is an independent organisation that writes rules to guard owners against fraud in the quick buying industry, as the website Property Sale Watchdog explains.

All true TPO members, for example LDN Properties, must commit to following these rules, which should give peace of mind when selling your home to them. Never sell your property to a company that cannot prove it is registered with TPO because it could be a scam.

Selling on your own

When you sell a property without any help from a third party like an estate agent or auctioneer, you become responsible for all of the tasks needed to secure a buyer. You will have to make a listing and advertise it, schedule viewings, hear offers and try to finalise a serious offer.

Expect this process to take many months or longer, and during that time you could get an offer from someone that later on revokes it because they changed their mind. Your sale would then fall apart, and they can’t face penalties unless you have exchanged contracts. It would likely extend your selling timeline much further as you’d have to start over with looking for a buyer.

You may also find that selling on your own is incredibly stressful and time consuming, as it requires a lot of effort and it is not something you can just do in your spare time.

The only clear perk of selling this way is that you prevent having to pay commission to an auctioneer or an estate agent, which eliminates that expense. But you might find that any such saving is wiped out by the money you will spend on the various tasks involved with selling your property, for example paying to promote your listing.