subject: Know The Facts About Setting The Price For Your House When Selling It [print this page] Hard times make for greater creativity on the part of homeowners who want to sell their homes. Necessity, it is often said, is the mother of invention, and in this tough real estate market that phrase means some motivated sellers and their agents have come up with a plan to justify the selling price of particular homes. I am talking about the tendency to inflate the square footage of a property in order to make it appear larger and therefore more valuable.
I'm not pointing a finger at anyone or any firm in particular, but the problem stems from the fact that lenders work with a dollars-per-square-foot formula, which is the reason a home with more square footage is considered more valuable than a comparable but smaller home. Space equals dollars to construct and those dollars add value to a home. In this particular space race some sellers are actually considering selling a home for cash in order to avoid the many problems associated with marketing their home just to get the attention of buyers, and then eventually closing a sale on their home that involves buyer financing. It can all become a living nightmare.
For decades it has been common practice in most parts of the country to rely on county assessors' measurements because it was easily verifiable, public knowledge. Real estate agents are personally liable if they advertise and promote a home with inaccurate square footage numbers. This is personal liability that most agents are unwilling to accept, so they just use the county numbers, knowing those numbers are very often inaccurate.
Let's put it this way - they are accurate enough for tax assessment purposes, but not for the more exacting mortgage lending process. That's the crux of the problem and the reason a growing number of sellers are giving consideration to selling a home for cash to a professional buyer. Relying on the measurements made by a county employee sometime in the past is not nearly as accurate as taking current measurements prior to advertising a home for sale.
The question becomes, who should conduct the measurement and what approach should be taken? Counties generally take exterior measurements and appraisers often take interior measurements, resulting in a noticeable differential in the size of an average home, not to mention a large home. Walls can take up over a foot of space in each direction, so it's easy to see how exterior measurements exaggerate the actual, useable floor space inside a home. The safest practice is to hire a professional appraiser to do the measurements if you decide to list your home on the multiple listing service instead of selling a home for cash.
