There’s a Lot to Be Learned from Your Neighbors’ Houses before You Sell Your Home
If you a have plan to sell your home in the near future, there is never a good time to be a little nosey about your neighbors’ houses than now. Let’s say you live in a popular area of Simpsonville and homes that have recently sold in your neighborhood are similar to yours, they can give you a sense of what Simpsonville home prices are really like in your neighborhood that can come in really handy when it’s time for you to list your home for sale.
Comparables or ‘comps’ are important for home sellers because it can help determine how much a house is worth. It’s important to know the comps in your area because not only it will help you determine your home value but it will also give you a wealth of information about your neighbors’ strategic upgrades or struggles in selling.
Here are 5 things you can learn from your neighbors’ home sales
1. Is Your Home Unique?
Compare your home to those properties similar to yours. If your home is the only of its kind, then you may not have to wait too long. That wouldn’t be the case though if you found 4 other homes of similar size, features, and condition in your neighborhood. You’ll have to price your home competitively or risk your home potentially sitting on the market for long.
The concept about comps is that your home is worth the buyers would be willing to pay for it – and the best way to determine how much buyers are willing to pay is by discovering how much they’ve paid for similar homes. So to determine your home value, you’ll need to find homes that are similar to yours in square footage, lot size, features, age, and condition.
2. What is the Current Market Climate?
You’ll have to do a little homework and find out about the current market activity in your area. How long are houses in your neighborhood sitting on the market? Has every home sold for at least 90 percent of listing price? Has home sold experienced multiple offers? You can tell from these indicators if the market is hot or not. It can help you refine your asking price or decide if you need to hold off selling your home until there’s more demand. Your neighbors’ houses can tell a lot about how yours will sell.
3. Price It Right
Setting the right price for your home is important. No matter how perfect your home is, if it’s not correctly priced, it wouldn’t matter. Buyers wouldn’t pay an overly priced house. Perhaps you can learn from a neighbor who put his house on the market with a steep price tag and learned a little too late when his house sat on the market too long and ended up reducing the asking price in the end.
When you price your home, do not only look in the competition’s price tags, look for sales comps. You’ll get a more valid idea of pricing your house by examining what has recently sold rather than what is currently for sale.
Of course, there are other things to consider when pricing your home right. You can learn more of that here. Factors to consider in pricing your home.
4. What the Buyers Are Looking For In Your Area?
When you look at comps, you can see what amenities or features are getting top dollar. If you can pick up on a pattern of interior features that are popular to buyers and you have them, you can make them a key part of your marketing.
Looking at the pattern of what buyers are looking for can also help you decide what projects to do if you consider remodeling your home.
5. Learn From Other Sellers In Your Neighborhood
You can learn a lot from sellers who sold their home. Equally, there’s also much to learn from sellers who took a very long time to sell or didn’t sell their home at all. Find homes near you that are not selling. These are homes that have the for-sale-sign on their yards for many months. Is the asking price too steep? How is the home’s curb appeal? Are there repairs not made? If you learn the sellers’ missteps in their homes or their listing strategy, you can avoid making them yourself.
Of course, gathering up information such as sales comps, helping you determine the asking price, or learning more about the active listings in your neighborhood is easier when you work with a real estate agent, as they have the resources and tools needed to dig out all the pertinent information from previous sales and active listings in your neighborhood.
But in a stage where you are just prepping your home for sale and you would like to do some research on your own, the internet has a wealth of real estate resources you can use to find ‘sold listing’ comps in your neighborhood. In addition, if you wish to find your home valuation based on the comps in your neighborhood, GreaterGreenvilleAreaHomes.com is a great tool. It can help determine an approximate value range of your home without the help of a professional.
