An appraisal of your current home’s value is an essential first step for owners looking to sell and move up the property ladder or downsize.
A value estimate grounded in reality rather than wishful thinking will ensure you don’t make any terrible or expensive mistakes when you consider your next property purchase.
The best appraisal will come from a trusted real estate agent.
They will assess your home, using their knowledge of the very latest sales in the area. And they will ask you about the property, improvements you’ve made over the years and the key selling points from your perspective.
Better still, they’ll also provide you with a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), which documents recent local sales of properties of similar style and size to your own.
Below, we’ve outlined a few alternative methods for trying to gauge the value of your property. It will be helpful, but we firmly believe a trusted and experienced agent will give you the most contemporary and accurate view.
Here are sources using automated value models that offer free valuation tools to help you better understand price trends and the impact on your home’s value.
If you use any of these sources, make your judgments based only on properties that are of a similar standard, size and style to your own. Also, take note of land sizes, as this is just as influential on value as the number of bedrooms, especially if the property might be of interest to a developer.
realEstimate – This tool is powered by PropTrack, which is part of Australia’s largest property portal, realestate.com.au. It offers users data on recent sales, local market trends and property characteristics, such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Each estimate comes with a confidence rating.
Home Price Guide – Part of property portal Domain, Home Price Guide provides access to estimated values, sales histories and neighbourhood trends. Like realEstimate, its estimates are taken from a proprietary, rich dataset of market performance.
NAB Property Insights: NAB uses the industry researcher Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) for its service. It generates reports that provide sales history, market trends and property features.
ANZ Property Reports: Using PropTrack as its data source, ANZ delivers price range estimates, details of the local suburb and reports of nearby property sales in the past six months.
CommBank Property Reports: Australia’s biggest bank has a similar service, and it also uses Cotality as its source of data.
Cotality – The researcher offers its own free service. The depth of its market data in Australia is second to none.
OnTheHouse: This site claims to offer a unique perspective by combining estimated values and historical property data.
OpenAgent: The OpenEstimates tool combines market data with your own description of your home. It’s a clever approach because not even the best data will necessarily know you added an extension, swimming pool or granny flat recently.