If you are interested in putting your home up for sale in the near future, then you will soon be likely to go through the painstaking and difficult task of placing an initial asking price on your home. This can be a very stressful thing to do, but it is one of the first things that you and your realtor will need to decide on before you can officially get your home on the market. Of course, you do not want to list your home at too high of an asking price, as doing so can scare away potential buyers. At the same time, asking for too little can leave you in the red.
Sometimes, having a professional appraisal done on your home prior to listing it can be appropriate. After all, one will need to be done before the final sale can be completed anyway. However, the fact remains that, most of the time, a pre-sale appraisal is not only unnecessary, but is a total waste of money.
The one situation in which a pre-sale appraisal may be appropriate is when you and your realtor are at a huge point of contention regarding what the list the home at. Perhaps you think your home should sell for no less than $200,000, while your realtor believes that anything above $175,000 is asking too much. When neither of you will budge, it may be helpful to have an appraisal done. In most cases, however, these appraisals tend to prove the realtor’s point rather than the seller’s and merely function as a reality check for the seller.
In other situations, an appraisal before a listing is mostly seen as a waste of money for a number of reasons. For starters, the market changes so fast these days that, by the time a house actually gets listed, the initial appraisal could be obsolete. Furthermore, buyers and buyers’ agents are typically not interested in what the appraised value of a house is, anyway. Instead, they are more interested in what they can get the house for. Not to mention, no two appraisals on the same house will yield the same appraised price.
So if you have been considering the option to get your home appraised before listing it, the fact is that it is probably best to go with your realtor’s suggestions and to save yourself the hassle and the money in the process.
