Property Hunting
One of the biggest questions is often how much is a house worth? And it’s one of the hardest, as a house can be worth a value to one person, and a different value to someone else.
This is particularly true for a home buyer vs an investor. An investor tends to be a bit more analytical around how much rent they can get, or what they can do with the property compared to a home buyer who has an emotional attachment as well.
This is just a little process that I have used to help work out a value, but just a word of caution, the online valuation tools aren’t always accurate, but they can help you form a picture.
One of the best things you can do is be in the market. What I mean by that is look online at properties, go to open homes and see what properties sell for to start getting an accurate picture of what properties are selling for in your area.
By being active, you will start to get a really good feel for property values, and whats in your price range, and what isn’t. It’s pretty hard when you start looking at properties and realise you can’t afford them and you need to lower your expectations.
In terms of finding out sales values, there are a few ways:
- Contact the agent and ask them what something sold for.
- If it’s an auction, you can typically see auction results online on the real estates website.
- After a little bit of time, the property sale value will be published on a website like homes.co.nz – you can search for the property and find out some information about it, including what it last sold for.
A process I would do when I was looking would be when I saw a property, or an area I like was to jump onto homes.co.nz and then look at the area, this shows you what other properties have sold in the area recently. You can then click in and see what they sold for, and if the photos of the property aren’t there, you can usually just google the street address and find the old sale listing. While not perfect, it does help to increase your feel for prices in the market.
To balance the online valuations that homes.co.nz generates I’d always use a couple of other online tools as well – something like oneroof.co.nz or qv.co.nz
By being ‘active’ you start to get a really good indication of what a property may be worth.