The Cascade Team Blog

Written by Blanche Evans          

When you and your Real Estate Professional sit down to price your home, you'll be looking at competitive homes that are the most similar in size, location and amenities as your home. You may find that prices can be thousands of dollars higher or lower. It's tempting to pick the highest price and say, "Let's list it here." But what if your home doesn't sell at that price?

High prices are a strategy that can work in an accelerating market, but it's risky. Your home can sit for months without selling and you'll end up marking the price down, perhaps lower than it should have sold for in the first place.

Pricing your home is a science. The science is choosing the right price at which your home will sell quickly. How do you do that? By analyzing your local market conditions and where your home fits in the spectrum.

The only way your home will sell at the highest price possible is if your buyer agrees to your home's value. To best determine market value, you have three important tools: CMAs, appraisals, and your Real Estate Professional knowledge of the market.

The comparative market analysis

A comparative market analysis (CMA) is a side-by-side comparison of similar homes for sale as well as homes that have recently sold in your neighborhood. Real Estate Professionalsuse CMAs to compare the features that make each home unique, including age, location, number of bedrooms, baths, room sizes, updates, condition, etc.

As a seller, you should be able to see where your home fits -- in the top or lower price range of similar homes. For example, if a similar home to yours has been recently renovated with a new kitchen, expect it to sell for more than your home if your home has not been improved.

The appraisal

An appraisal is a market analysis performed by a professional appraiser using a variety of sources, including multiple listing system data and conforming loan formulas.

Appraisers most often work for lenders to determine market values, so that lenders can weigh the risk of making a loan to a homebuyer. Appraisals come after an offer is made when the buyer applies for a loan. Even though the buyer pays for the appraisal, the lender uses it to determine whether or not to make the loan at the contract price.

Other market data

Your Real Estate Professionalhas access to data that may not be public through the Multiple Listing Service. This data is provided to broker members to track market trends over weeks, months and years. Some brokers pay data companies for specific markets that help them plan their business, such as the number of listings on hand, which zip codes are the hottest, and whether closings are trending up or down over last month or last year.

Your Real Estate Professionaluses all this data to help you hit the sweet spot of pricing. That's high enough to reflect your home's value, but attractive enough to buyers to get it sold quickly.

 Introducing SpyDoor; The Cascade Team’s Automated Valuation Solution  

1. The only home valuation tool to go “Hyper”-Local with communities as small as 10 homes. 
2. Blending fully integrated MLS Sold, Active and Pending data with Tax records and County Assessed values.
3. Ability to manually adjust values such as: # of Beds, Baths, sq ft, etc
4. Full demographics down to the Hyper Local level 
5. Pull school boundaries with regular updates from State and county websites.
   

Your Home’s Value/ Your Neighbor’s Home Value/ Any Home Down the Street

The Cascade Team has deployed a class of an Automated Valuation Model (AVM) that has stood the test of time. It employs both a Hedonic modeling approach and Market Comp approach yielding several potential valuations of the home.

1)     Hedonic: This tool uses a multivariate modeling approach that compares the subject property being valued to the nearby sales in the area that most closely emulate the subject property. Using its unique SpatialMatch® search engine, SpyDoor locates sales data by proximity and “comparability” to the subject property. The search radiates out from the subject property and once a sufficient number of comparables has been found, the SpyDoor AVM performs regression analysis on the data and outputs a value based on the use of the sales in closest proximity and likeness to the subject property.

2)     Market Comp Approach: Devised and refined by a long standing SRA Appraiser with 25 years of experience, this valuation application emulates an appraiser’s thought process for sales comparable selection and makes adjustments for variances in the comps relative to the subject property. This methodology has been refined over many years. Once these adjustments are made, a valuation estimate is determined by the software application. 

3)     Blended Value: This is a very straightforward application. The formula is simply Hedonic + Market Comp Approach / 2. This allows the user to have three separate looks at a value in one model.

The Cascade Team has devised the most advanced home pricing program integrating the most complex and market accurate data anywhere. This customer facing tool blends MLS, Tax Assessed Values and SRA Appraiser tactics into one easy to use application.

Click HERE to start your SpyDoor Search Now!