Home Appriasal

Long story short - we bought our house 8 yrs ago, market crashed and now we are stuck here.

I want to get a true appraisal of the home but doesn't it cost a lot of money? If I even wanted to go as far as a real estate agent to discuss selling my house - does it cost a lot of money for them just walk in my door? I would want to know what they think we could sell our house for?

We did look into a 203k loan - but the appraisal was $1000 for something that I don't think we will qualify for.

Home Appriasal

An Appraisal can be anywhere from $300-$500. It doesn't cost anything to have an agent do a market analysis on your house but be upfront and honest with your intentions. Let the agent know you are unsure of the value and are considering selling but want to get a value of the home so you will know if you are still upside down on your mortgage.

Re: Home Appriasal

We just got our appraisal report 1-2 weeks ago and it costs us $300. We used a certified appraiser based in North Merrick. He came to the house, took measurements of the inside/outside, walked around for maybe 15 min and I paid cash. The report was emailed to me 2 days later. Sadly, our house appraised for much, much less than we expected so we decided not to list because we don't want to deal with a potential buyer backing out of a contract should the appraisal come back less than the sale price.

Edited to add: we also met w a realtor from Douglass Elliman who came to our house and gave us a pretty CMA (competitive market analysis) which broke down the average # of houses in our area that sold for what price in the past X months and what houses are currently on the market. (And thus serve as our competition).

I would recommend you contact at least 3-4 realtors, including the small local ones in your town and compare the info they tell you. The realtor in one town gave us 3 comps for homes that were all on the upper end of our range, vs another realtor who was more realistic and flat out suggested we sell for X price which happened to be only $15K more than what our appraisal came in at..(so DH already is leaning toward choosing that realtor over the other ones who gave us inflated #s which we know a buyer will not pay considering we are in a flood zone). It is always interesting to see how different realtors compare your home to others- and you do get print outs of all the MLS listings for homes similar to yours that sold in the past 6 months and exactly what the list/contract sales price is, how many days it sat on the market, and pictures of those listings which may not be available on MLS (although Redfin has all that info plus Property History but you would need to dedicate a couple of hours to plug in every address from every MLS listing to do this yourself).

Message edited 3/18/2014 9:24:57 PM.