subject: What Happens During Home Appraisals [print this page] Everyone that insures or sells that home will be subjected to home appraisals. Although these make some people nervous (since they determine the value of the home), they are painless procedures. Getting good home appraisals is one of the best ways to find out how to add value to your home.
Day of the Appraisal
During a home appraisal, a qualified home appraiser will walk through your home, looking at all the features and structures, often taking photos, writing notes and asking lots of questions. Although it would be nice to have the appraiser walk through a clean home, it is not necessary. They are trained to look at the Big Picture of a home to assess its value. Quick cosmetics dont change a thing.
Some appraisers will take measurements of home features, but most will reply on the homes blueprints stored in county or city records for those measurements. If significant changes have been made, it is the owners duty to point them out, since they can seriously affect the value of a home.
Extra Research
When performing home appraisals, one of the biggest factors used is the selling price of other homes in your area. Appraisers will go back six months to a year and look for features in other houses that affected the price and are similar to your own. They use this information to help determine the value of your home more accurately. Before your appraisal, get an idea of how homes in your area have been selling by looking at online real estate markets.
When selling or buying a home, the mortgage company will often hire a home appraiser to provide an unbiased report, which is sent to the mortgage company then delivered to the buyer and seller. Dont really on this as your sole means of learning about your home. Hire a company to provide independent home appraisals, that way you guarantee getting a fair and accurate estimate of your homes worth.
Insurance Appraisals
In the case of insurance walkthroughs, the appraiser is concentrating on the replacement value of the home rather than the market value. They consider the exact cost of replicating the features of the home, and then subtract depreciation with age. This gives the estimate of the home value. Thats why you sometimes hear the value of home for insurance purposes although this value is inflated compared to the market value. However, they do take the same features into account.
