Are you going to have a home appraiser come out to your house sometime soon to provide you with an appraisal? If so, you might be a nervous wreck right now wondering how high your home is going to appraise for.
Fortunately, there are some pretty simple home appraisal tips that you can put to good use to maximize your home’s value. Whether you’re selling a home and trying to get it to appraise for the highest amount possible or doing an appraisal as part of the refinancing process, you can increase your home’s value by leaps and bounds.
Check out five home appraisal tips below that home sellers, realtors, and others can start using today. They’ll make a big difference in what your home appraises for in the end.
1. Begin by Improving Your Home’s Curb Appeal
You might be under the impression that a home appraiser’s job starts when they walk through your front door. But in reality, it actually starts long before that!
A home appraisal officially begins when an appraiser pulls up in front of your home. They’re going to take a look at your home’s curb appeal and see where it stands at the moment.
If there are shutters hanging off your home, paint peeling off your front door, and overgrown bushes and trees all over the place, it’s not going to reflect well on your home. Your appraiser is going to start docking you points right from the start.
It’s why you need to do whatever you can to improve your home’s curb appeal. It’ll make a stronger first impression on an appraiser and get your appraisal off to a fantastic start.
You can give your home’s curb appeal a boost by doing things like:
- Ripping out old bushes, trees, plants, etc. and replacing them with new ones
- Putting a fresh coat of paint on your front door (and maybe on your house as a whole!)
- Replacing your old mailbox with a new one
- Powerwashing your front porch, driveway, walkways, etc.
- Cleaning your roof
Your home’s curb appeal is going to be very important in the grand scheme of things. You should help your house put its best foot forward by improving it as best you can.
2. Make Some of the Minor Home Improvement Repairs You’ve Been Putting Off
When you live in a home, your to-do list is always going to be about a mile long. There are inevitably going to be some home improvement jobs that get put off time and time (and time!) again.
You should do something about this when you schedule a home appraisal. It would be a great idea to walk around the inside and outside of your home and make any repairs that you’ve been putting on the back burner for far too long now.
If you have a leaky kitchen sink that needs to be fixed, it would be a great time to get around to doing it. It would also be a great time to fix any doors that don’t close or any windows that are stuck shut. If you have a faulty built-in fridge, you could even arrange for Refrigerator Repair services to fix any issues and get your kitchen in perfect condition.
3. Gather Information About Any Upgrades You’ve Made in Your Home Over Time
Did you recently remodel your kitchen? Did you renovate your bathroom? Did you replace your HVAC system?
These are all things that your home appraiser is going to want to know about! It could very well help determine how they appraise your home.
You should gather all the information that you have on these kinds of upgrades and have them ready for your appraiser when they arrive at your home. This is one of the most important home appraisal tips as it’ll save you a ton of time and potentially increase your home’s value quite a bit.
4. Educate Yourself on How Much Other Homes in Your Area Are Worth
When an appraiser is in the process of trying to come up with a value for your home, they’ll often look at the values of other comparable homes in your area. This will help them calculate what your home might be worth.
You can do this yourself to see approximately how much your home might be worth. You won’t be surprised to see your home valuation come in higher or lower than you may have initially guessed when you know what other homes in your area are worth.
Just because a house next door is worth a certain amount of money doesn’t mean yours will be worth the same amount. But it will give you a general idea of right around what your home might be worth when everything is all said and done.
5. Try Being as Nice as You Possibly Can to Your Home Appraiser
You’re not necessarily going to be able to butter a home appraiser up and get them to value your home a whole lot higher than they would otherwise. But the simple act of being nice might make them a little more lenient when they’re walking through your home.
If you give an appraiser a reason to do it, they might look for any little problems in your home that could bring its value down. It’s why you want to try to stay on their good side at all times.
These Home Appraisal Tips Should Provide You With the Result You Want
There is no guarantee that any of these home appraisal tips are going to make your home worth substantially more money. But it wouldn’t hurt to give them a shot.
Before you welcome a home appraiser into your home, you should put these home appraisal tips to the test and see what kind of results you get. With a little luck, they might have your home appraising for more than you thought it would.
Get more real estate tips and tricks by reading through the other articles on our blog.