How Does My Home Compare To Your Home?
A Comparative Market Analysis can be a pretty hefty tool. After all you’ll be basing your homes worth on what this report says. A CMA take similar properties in your area, compares them and then tells you what your home should be selling for based on your area. The question that comes up then is “What’s considered a similar property?”
Ideally, a property should be matched up to other similar properties. The comparison is made on a couple of different criteria. To start off with the houses need to be sold recently, preferably in the past 6 months and it should be the same size both in square footage and lot size. The houses being compared should also be the same style and period. For example, a Victorian house can’t be compared to a one story ranch. The internal layout of the house, such as how many bedrooms, bathrooms etc should be equal and the houses should have approx the same age as well.
For most areas, this doesn’t provide too much of problem, mainly because most areas are built in the same style and around the same time, however for some houses, especially for older or out of the way places this creates a problem. Similar properties should be carefully selected and if not available, an experienced real estate agent can account for differences in properties and adjust the value of the property accordingly to come up with a correct CMA.
S. Thomas is the Content Manager for a company that provides a free home value estimator online.
