Wondering just how much your house is worth right now? It’s a key question and answering it is absolutely essential because it can help you decide how much insurance you need on your home to how much equity you currently have built up. How do you even begin to find the right number, though?
Why It Matters
It might help to first understand why it matters that you know how much your home is worth. Maybe the most important space where knowing that figure matters is when you want to sell your home. You don’t even want to begin considering selling your home until you know how much its worth and the reason for that is fairly simple. If you overestimate how much your home is worth, it could end up sitting on the market for weeks. If you underestimate the value of your property, though, it will sell quite quickly, but you could have made so much more. Knowing how much your home is worth before you ever approach an estate agent, then, is nothing short of essential.
Another time you may want to know the value of your home, though, is if you’d like to refinance your mortgage. Many banks and mortgage brokers can offer you a much better deal than you initially got on your mortgage, allowing you to access both lower interest rates and the equity in your home simultaneously. To do so, though, you’ll need to know the value of your home.
There are other times when it’s important to know the value of your home, too, though. If you want to make improvements to your home, it may help to better understand how much it’s worth now and what it might be worth as you make those improvements, as that can help you decide whether it’s actually worth it to make the improvements in the first place. Moreover, knowing so you can ensure you have the right amount of building and contents insurance coverage to protect you in the event something terrible happens is absolutely essential as well.
Finding the Value of Your Home
Once you know why you need to learn more about the value of your home, it’s time to actually make it happen, and the process is simpler than you think. You can start by looking at the Land Registry’s website. You can research similar houses in your area, and then look at what they’ve recently sold for. That may help to provide you with a good estimate of what your home is worth, too. You can also use an online valuation tool from a site like Rightmove or Zoopla to help get some basic data about what your home might be worth.
There are a few other ways to get a closer look at the value of your home, too. You can work with an estate agent to get a good number. In most cases, estate agents offer you a complementary valuation because they’re hoping that should you choose to list your home, you’ll do so with them. If you choose to go this route, though, you may want to talk to a few different estate agents, as each one may provide you with a very different number, and you’ll want to get some sense of where the basic value of your home is.
You could also work with a professional valuator. While this is likely to get you the best result, it can also be fairly expensive. Professional valuators take a number of different factors into consideration like the property’s location and all of its features. They then come up with a reliable number that you can take o an estate agent or even your bank. The cost of working with a professional, however, is usually between £150 and £800, depending on the location and size of the property.
Determining your home’s value is an absolute necessity in many cases, but even if you’re just curious about what your home may be worth, there are many different ways to establish value. Understand your options, then choose the best one so you can truly get answers to questions like, how much is my house worth right now?
