How to Determine the Value of Your Home

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Determining the value of your home is an important thing to many people regardless of the economy, but it is especially important these days, as the housing market has been in a serious, frightening flux in recent years. 

So for those who are concerned about their home's value and the amount of money they may have lost when the recent real estate bubble burst, there are a number of things they can do to keep tabs on their home value as the economy tries to claw it's way back.

Acquire the Necessary Information About Your Home

Before spending any time and money trying to determine what your home is worth in today's real estate market, you should first acquire all the necessary information about your home. 

This will entail square footage, number of rooms, when it was constructed, who constructed it, what materials it is made out of, availability of transportation, and, the most important aspect of any piece of real estate, where it is located. 

Once you acquire all of these figures from the blueprint of your home or the people who constructed your home, you can move on to the next step in trying to determine it's actual value.

Snap Online Values

With some of this basic information, you can determine what your home is worth by entering it into an online database. This is similar to determining the worth of your car before you sell it by entering in the information about it on Kelley Blue Book. It will give you a ballpark idea of what it is worth.

Ask Your Real Estate Agent

The real estate agent who first sold you your home, if you did not build it yourself, will be able to tell you an approximate value of your home, based on these aforementioned figures above and also what other homes are currently selling for in your particular area. 

This will be a range of values most of the time, which will give you a basic idea of what your home is worth and let you know if the price has fluctuated up or down significantly. However, a real estate agent usually won't be able to give you exact specifics about the worth of your home, as this is not their area of expertise.

Independent Appraiser

To get a more exact estimate of what you can price your home at and what it is worth exactly, you will have to hire an independent appraiser who will charge by the hour and come out to your house and give you their assessment of what your home is worth. 

This is usually important when trying to refinance your home or sell your home close to its exact value. Often times a bank will hire an independent appraiser they trust to come out to look at a home to determine it's value and give them a relatively unbiased idea of it's value. 

However, you should also hire your own independent appraiser to determine the value of the home every so often, so that you have your own personal assessment of your home's value. Knowing what your home is worth is a lot like knowing how much your stock portfolio is generally worth.