A real estate appraisal is a professional’s formal estimation of a property’s market value. A property appraisal is nearly always required by a lender before they approve a home mortgage.
If you are listing your home for sale, then you would be well advised to get an appraisal if:
- Your home is unique for its area, and recent comparable sales fail to predict what it could actually sell for;
- Very few comparable homes in your area have sold recently; or
- Your home includes lots of land, as well as features like a pool and/or multiple outbuildings.
If you are selling your property at auction, then it is just as necessary to get an appraisal. Doing so will give you a goal to reach for, help you select a sensical minimum bid, and let you know whether you have auctioned off your property for a decent price. Ideally, you want to celebrate auctioning your property for higher than its market value – but you will only know that you did if you had your property appraised beforehand.
How to Get the Highest Appraisal
We would never recommend misrepresenting a property by assigning it a greater value than it reasonably deserves. That said, there are many things you can do prior to an appraisal to ensure it is valued as highly as possible. A little landscaping and handyman work can go a long way!
- Perform basic yard care. One can never underestimate the importance of curb appeal. It is literally the first impression your property will make. Fortunately, tidying up a lawn, removing its dead trees and fallen branches, and pouring fresh mulch and gravel are within anyone’s capabilities. If your walkways and driveway are in serious need of repair, then calling a specialist to take care of them can prove well worth your while.
- Install New Exterior Doors. After the landscaping, the next things homebuyers (and by extension property appraisers) notice are the exterior and garage doors. If either of these features are looking poorly, then you stand much to gain by replacing them. The return on investment (ROI) for installing a new exterior door is approximately 70%. Replacing a worn out garage door, on the other hand, is likely to pay for itself during closing.
- Fresh paint. It’s a surface deep improvement, but it works wonders. If you paint the interior of a property before selling it, you can reasonably anticipate a 107% The ROI for exterior painting is typically only half that, although it can be significantly more if an exterior has become especially worse for wear over time.
- Update bathroom and kitchen. These are the two most important rooms of a house from an appraiser’s standpoint. Both are highly practical, and spaces where homeowners spend many of their waking hours. We aren’t advising exhaustively remodeling these rooms, as doing so will not net a proportionate ROI. But if you have any badly stained backsplash, ugly plumbing fixtures, nonfunctional appliances, or terribly outdated aesthetic features, then replacing them is likely to greatly improve the appraiser’s opinion of your property’s value.\
- Make minor repairs. We’re being intentionally ambiguous here. Really, anything that sticks out as dreadful – such as a broken lightswitch, discolored electrical outlet, hole in the drywall, moldy patch of wall, missing ceiling panel, or cracked floor tile – pretty much begs replacement before the appraiser’s arrival.
- Make property accessible. We aren’t referring to “accessibility” in the Americans with Disabilities Act sense of the word. We’re merely pointing out that you should take whichever steps you can to make the appraiser’s job as easy as possible. Unlock any gates which block access to the full perimeter of the house. Cage any dogs which might give someone a scare. Remove any piles of clutter which obstruct large swaths of wall, or block access to mechanical units or the electrical panel. Putting in this effort will make the appraiser happy – and a happy appraiser is more likely to adopt an optimistic attitude toward a property’s market value.
Are you holding an estate auction in the greater Denver, CO area that includes the sale of a house? Then we welcome you to contact Colorado Premier Realty & Auction Services today. Our comprehensive auction services include appraisals by professionals who are all certified by the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. Any one of them will give you the accurate appraisal which sets you up for success on auction day!