Whether you're thinking about selling your home or deciding whether to pull out some equity through a home equity line of credit, it's important to have a good understanding of the value of your home. In today's short article, we're going to take a look at how to properly determine the value of your home. There are various methods you can use and the one you choose to partake in will highly depend on the reason for your home price evaluation.

Online Valuation Tools

One of the best ways to get a fairly decent quote of the value of your home is to look at online valuation tools. Sites like Zillow, Realtor, and Trulia will give you estimated home values. You'll simply need to go to their website, type in your address, and click the search estimation button. These numbers tend to be within a fairly accurate range of the true value of your home. This is a great initial step to give you a ballpark estimate of the value that you're dealing with. However, don't take these online valuation tools to heart. Their numbers can be off when compared to formal appraisals.

Get A CMA

A CMA, known as a comparative market analysis, is a form of estimating the value of a home that many real estate companies use. They have detailed software programs that will provide an estimate of your home value based on other homes in the local market that have recently sold. You can get a CMA from any experienced realtor. There are some select sites online that can offer this type of CMA for a fee. When you go through your own realtor, they should be able to provide you with a free CMA. Again, this shouldn't be considered a replacement to a formal appraisal. Rather, it should be able to give you a fair estimation of value.

Get A Formal Appraisal

The best way to get an exact value of what your home is worth is to get a formal appraisal. This is done by a professional appraiser in your local market. They will evaluate your home based on the market, property, and comparable properties in the broad area. These appraisal reports tend to be many pages long and breakdown your property on every level. The home appraisal cost is well worth the accuracy of the data that you receive from the appraisal company. Many lenders will require that a formal appraisal is completed prior to the purchase or refinance of an existing property.

Do Your Own Comparative Search

With the variety of realty sites out there, you can easily look up the recent homes that have sold in your area. You'll want to take a look at homes that are as similar as possible to your own home. Look for similar square footage, lot size, bathrooms, bedrooms, porches, and home style. This will provide you with the most accurate resale value. Look for homes that have been sold within the last three to six months. This will provide you with the most recent value of your home. Some great sites to use for this type of self comparative search are Realtor, Homesnap, Neighborhood Scout, PropertyShark, and Redfin.

Determining the value of your existing home can be essential for so many different reasons. Depending on the reason that you want to know your home's value, there are different approaches you can take to determine it that vary in price from free to a few hundred dollars. Realize that if you're just looking at the value for the purpose of just knowing, then you can use online sites to get a fair idea of price without investing any money. However, it's important to realize that when you apply for any type of financing, it's likely you'll need to pay to get a formal appraisal completed as a must-do requirement of your new lender.