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Using the Internet to Research Market Value Can be Costly

 

 

 

One of the many valuable services Realtors® have performed for clients, and prospective clients, is an estimate of the Market Value of a home the client is thinking about buying or selling. Realtors^® estimate the Market Value of a property by analyzing how much buyers have recently paid for similar properties (for sellers, they try to estimate the highest price a buyer will pay for the home. For buyers, they try to estimate a fair price so the buyer doesn’t over-pay).

Sometime ago, web­sites started popping up offering estimates of a home’s Market Value. Many buyers and sell­ers felt that they could get that information themselves – bypassing their Realtor®. What they often found is a determination of value that is several weeks old, and values that are inaccu­rate by several thousands of dollars, with lots of fine print.

After researching several of these property profile searches on the Internet, it was found that the accuracy compared to actual sales prices differed more than 6% in almost half of the com­parisons! The difference was over 10% in almost a third! When you consider that many homes in the Bay Area sell in excess of $700,000, that dif­ference is significant.

Why is this? Because information contained on the property value websites is often delayed due to downloads and timing issues in transferring data from the Multiple Listings Service, which Realtors® use to get their data, along with many other sources like county records. Addition­ally, a website doesn’t know the in’s and out’s of a specific area. It doesn’t know that being on the North side of the street, for instance, is much preferable than the South in your neighborhood. It wouldn’t know that the condition of a home sold three streets away from the property being researched was ex­tremely poor and the property was sold in “as-is” condition.

The real estate market can be tricky, and having a Realtor® with up-to-the-minute information, along with the personal knowledge of your local area is crucial to getting the best price possible on your purchase or sale. When you hire a Real­tor®, you can rest assured that all aspects of your home buying experience will be handled in real time, by a real person, with real experience.