You're interested in finding out the value of a particular home in the Palm Beach Gardens area.
- Maybe you're looking to purchase and you want to find out what the home is REALLY worth OR
- You already own a home and want to refinance OR
- You're a serious seller and you want to price the home to sell, not to sit OR
- You just want to find out how much your place is currently worth to see if you made a good investment.
The reason doesn't matter - you just want to know the value of Property 'A' and you need the figure to be as accurate as possible.
Without a doubt, the BEST way is to hire a Professional Appraiser
For any one Appraiser to be successful he/she needs to be as accurate as possible. Valuation is all that they do so if they don't do their very best, they won't be around the business for long. BTW, if financing is involved, using an Appraiser is your ONLY choice.
Next best would be to get a CMA from a Real Estate Agent or Broker
They will take a look at your home and compare it to the most recent sales (w/in the last 6 months) of the most comparable properties or COMPS. It's very important that you use someone that specializes in the area you're interested in because they have detailed local knowledge.
Finally, we've arrived at the WORST possible choice - automated on-line property valuations.
People like to use them because they are anonymous, free and quick. However they are incredibly inaccurate! I'm not going to mention a specific company because they are all bad.
As an example, let's specifically look at Palm Beach County. By one site's own admission, only 54% of the homes sold in the County come in within 20% of the site's estimated value. In other words, their values are off by more than 20% in 46% of the cases! Granted, garbage in, garbage out - if the site hasn't collected enough accurate data they can't be expected to be too accurate.
The problem crops up when the general public runs a search on one of the sites and takes the value as the end-all-be-all.
If you want to see just how inaccurate the values are, try several of the sites the spread of values on the same piece of property will make you laugh (or cry).
When dealing with what will probably be the biggest purchase of your life you need ACCURATE, not QUICK.
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