How do you find out home value w/out appraisal?

check out zillow.com

we bought in way cheap because of Hurricane Katrina prices, appraisal was like 40k more than our loan

wish we couldve bought two houses when we moved lol

we had to have more than one appraisal, not sure where you get the amount without going that route though..

i just had an appraisal done on our house last month for shits and giggles

we started construction of it in Feb 2006 and finally closed in Jul 2007

turns out it has dropped over a ton in 2-3 years LOL oh well, that's phoenix for you

Thanks hon, that did the trick for a rough estimate.

It show the existence of 3 houses to the left of mine, but it gives me a number to work with.

I am upside, but barely, according to this. Also according to this, from the last actual appraisal I had done when I re-fi'ed slightly over 2 years ago, the value of my house has dropped about $35k

Lovely.

Much appreciated!

All appraisals use comparative analysis, I believe it's required...

Appraisers generally look at your house and compare it against similar houses in the area. Then deduce or add depending on the differences between the houses.

I got an awesome deal a month and a half ago when I bought my first house. Listed at $200k more than I paid, appraised at $100k more than I paid and the appraiser missed two full baths, radiant flooring throughout the entire house, and a few other things! I bought the house out of foreclosure on the builder. Now I just have projects for years, hahahha

Any houses similar to yours for sale in your neighborhood? Have any sold recently? Do an online search for your counties PVA the selling prices are public records.

There, you have just done 75% of a residential home appraisal.


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Here's the categories they compare against:

Sale Price
Sale Price / Gross living area
Location (Suburban, suburban/superior, etc...)
Site (Acreage)
View (Mountains, Mountains/Good, Ocean, Ocean/Good, etc...)
Design Style
Quality of Construction
Actual Age
Condition
Room Count / Living area
Basement finished
Rooms below grade (unfinished)
Functional Utility
Heating / Cooling
Energy Efficient Items
Garage / Carport
Porch area
Fireplaces

The adjustments are based off of those items :P

Zillow isn't all that accurate (I used it and then asked my agent about it).

One easy way to find out what your house is worth is call to re-finance and then you give the bank your info. Only takes them 10 seconds to come back and tell you that your house isn't worth half of what you paid for it. : )

Agreed on this, Zillow is far from accurate. I've seen identical floorplan and quality houses on the same block shown with radically different "zestimates" and it's happened in multiple cities. Zillow is causing a lot of people a lot of problems, and their response to complaints is always on par with Craigslist's complaint responses: "we're correct, we know what we're doing, sorry nothing can be changed, proprietary formulas, etc."

Zillow is as inaccurate as they come...you'd be more accurate by just guessing.

You can order a BPO (Brokers Price Opinion), which run about $150 ... it's what the banks use to determine the price on an REO.

You can also be sneaky and just call an agent and pretend you want to sell but then they'll be up your ass.

This is something I am actually qualified to discuss because my mainstream business is selling foreclosures for the banks ... but I don't actually do the work. I don't even know what listings I have ... five people at the office take care of all of that for me. I haven't personally sold a house since last September.

It depends on how much money you put down, to tell if you are upside down or not. Also, it depends grately on your area (part of the country, state, city, all t he way down to neighborhood). Generally speaking if you put down 20% 3-4 years ago you probably owe on your mortgage what the house is now worth.

Also depends on your mortgage, how many years did you do it for and what was the interest rate. If you did it for 30 years with a higher rate, you will be paying a lot more interest than principle in the beginning. If you did a low rate over 20 years for example, around year 5 half of your payment will be interest the other half will be principle. It's nice when you can get to the flipping point where more goes to principle than interest. If your note is 2K a month you know 1K of that is going into equity.

If you really want to know a ball park price on what your house is worth, contact a real-estate agent and tell them you are looking to buy (describe your house) and could they give find you listings and comps for those houses. Ask them for the comps because you want to see what houses in the area you interested in (your area) have been selling for. You will be able to see the basics of the houses, sqft, location, etc... but you wont know things like if it had formica or granite countertops, wood or carpet, etc.. if it was run down or kept up etc... If the agent gives you say 20 comps, i would take the average price per sqft from all 20. The decide how your house compares, is it average, a lot better, or worse than most of the other comps. If you feel your house is avg then go with the avg price per sqft from the comps, multiple by your total sqft and you will have a rough estimate of what your house will sell for.

What your house is worth and what it will sell for are two different things. The appraisal will tell you what its worth (that appraiser's opinion anyway I've seen it vary a good bit from one to another). The comps will show you what you can actually sell it for based off of what other people are sell. Looking at what is for sale is mainly a lot of people who are pipe dreaming thinking their house is worth that much but they will never get it ;)

I know for the county I live in the tax assessor has a website that you can search properties. You can search street ranges. When you click on an address you see a picture of the house, the floor plan, information about sq. footage, bedrooms, etc as well as the last sale price and date. You can look up surrounding houses as well to see what they sold for. It also lists the last assessed price.

This is in a city of 60k people so I can imagine larger cities have similar websites.

BTW, the zillow site listed the tax assessors value from 2006, which has since went up $10,000 by checking their website. My local tax assessors website lists all of the zillow information and much much more.

damn talk about a burglars wet dream

zillow shows a pretty big $$ range, i have never seen a listing which was out of their range...not sure an appraiser really does much better job, obviously depends on the variables..