How much is your home worth?

With the current Orlando-area real estate market the way it is, this is a question that many people are not able to answer. This is not surprising either, what with our local-area market practically flooded with distress sales and foreclosure sales, not many folks can give an accurate estimation of how much a specific house in a specific area is worth. This not only affects those who are selling their homes, those who are thinking of refinancing their homes or folks who are buying a homes  are also faced with this dilemma.

So what can you do in order to formulate the realistic value of a home? First, there are several websites out there that publish the sale prices of homes including Zillow.com and Realtor.com. These websites publish the price that similar homes in your area have sold for and can help you to get a general idea of your home’s value in relation to recent sales in your neighborhood. Using these and similar websites, it is possible to see the selling price of homes in your area within 24 hours of the closing. This information can be helpful in determining what your home’s value is, but it’s important to remember that Bank-owned, foreclosures and other distress sales may take more than 6 months to sell in some cases, and this makes it difficult to determine how much these homes have sold for until much later. So, if there are many foreclosure or other distress sales in your neighborhood, it is trickier to find out your home’s true market value. Then you have to consider that not all of the information on these sites is 100% accurate. They are a good starting place that can give you a good idea of a specific home’s value, but they are not infallible.

I still tell all my clients and friends that the best way to truly find out the value of a home or formulate asking prices or bids is to sit down with a knowledgeable local-area real estate professional. A good real estate agent can help you to look at all of the factors that help to determine a home’s value and can help you to arrive at a realistic and reasonable value for a specific home. This is, after all, what they do for a living. They deal with these situations every day and can be indispensable, not only in the valuation of a home, but everything else that goes into buying or selling homes as well.

I have been working as a real estate agent in the Orlando area for more than 10 years and I am continually studying our local real estate markets in order to be able to provide my clients with the absolute best level of professionalism and proficiency in all of the Orlando area. Real estate is my business and I take my business seriously.

If you are thinking of buying or selling a home in the Orlando area, please contact me to schedule an interview to see how I can help you be a successful buyer or seller. I can help you with every step of the home buying or home selling process so that you can be free to do whatever it is that you do best.

Renovation no-nos

The Church has its list of seven deadly sins, and apparently, so do contractors.  While reading the OrlandoSentinel.com earlier, I ran across an article entitled, “7 deadly sins of home renovation” which should be a good read for anyone who is currently contemplating home renovations.

Let us review the seven deadly sins first, pride, envy, anger, gluttony, lust, greed and sloth.  How can these characteristics contribute to badly performed renovations or remodeling projects? 

Pride comes before a fall.  Do not be overconfident in your abilities to remodel your home yourself.  If you are going to undertake the project yourself, be sure to plan and prepare for eventualities.  Do not assume that you are Bob Villa and will be able to deal with whatever problems Mr. Murphy may send your way.  Plan, research and prepare.

Envy can lead us to act irrationally.  It can make us desire more than is necessary or logical.  The general rule for remodeling is that your newly remodeled structure should be no more than 20% larger than the biggest home in your neighborhood.

Gluttony can make you overly concerned getting more than your share.  This can translate into accepting an unusually low bid from a contractor.  Get multiple bids and discard any that are more or less than 5% of the average of all the bids.  Remember that you get what you pay for.

Lust seems a bit out of context here, seeing as how we are discussing inanimate objects.  However, when planning renovations, you may be tempted to choose projects that will make you more comfortable as opposed to those that are more important.  The article recommends making safety renovations and performing preventive maintenance first.

Remove the possibility for anger towards an unscrupulous contractor by doing some research.  This article recommends using standard bank credit applications to investigate contractors whom you are thinking of hiring and performing credit checks.  Remember to discard bids that are too high or too low.  Save yourself some anger by really researching potential contractors and hiring only reputable firms that are licensed and insured.

Greed may get the best of you when it comes to selecting bids from different contractors.  Specify exactly what the job consists of and what brand of product you are having installed.  If you can compare bids for identical jobs with identical products, you will be able to choose a bid more easily.

And most importantly, do not fall victim to sloth.  Remember the six Ps, proper previous planning prevents poor performance.  Do your research and find out as much as possible about the job at hand and you will ensure that your next home remodeling or renovation will come out exactly as you expected.

Click to read, “7 deadly sins of home renovation” in the OrlandoSentinel.com