We’re commencing our hopefully positive journey into at some point in the future buying a property I’ll actually be HAPPY in, and in 10 days have our first property valuation by a real estate agent.
We met him at an open house inspection and he seemed nice (as most of them do *suspicious eyebrow raised* lol) and blah, blah, we were saying how we’d need to sell before buying and so on, and he mentioned coming to do a valuation, which we’d been wanting to do for a while anyway. So we booked him in a few weeks later. He’s from Harcourts.
Anyway, so…I assume what’ll happen is he’ll take into account the suburb and the street, the frontage appearance of the building and surrounding gardens, the fact it’s got a pool, the building is secure with key and intercom access, and it’s got an underground car park and our specific property comes with one car space and a lockup storage shed.
And then how many bedrooms, the square metre size of the property, the quality and condition, the age, the fact it’s on the ground floor, amount of storage available, the outdoor aspect (large patio), the fact pets are allowed, etc…
Do they tend to notice things like noise? And light? Our apartment used to be fairly quiet, but over the past 6 or so months it’s descended into loudness most of the time. We’re bordered on both sides and above by other apartments and particularly the ones upstairs, are just SO LOUD. I seriously am concerned about what would happen if we had an open house or inspection. Any potential buyer would be scared away by the constant thumping, tapping and knocking from upstairs! Not to mention the loud music (and I mean REALLY loud. Ridiculously so. To the point we can’t hear out own TV when it’s up loud and all our doors and windows are closed)…and except for between about 9am-11am, our place tends to be quite dark inside, even with all curtains wide open. Our balcony has a large and wide ceiling that overhangs and so no sunlight gets as far as the windows (the darkness gets to me, I must admit, but it does tend to keep the place cool in Summer, which is good).
Anyway, so…in your experience, fellow members, are real estate agent valuations ok? Meaning, if we get say, 3 of them (which we intend to), and they’re all within around $20,000 of each other, can we basically trust that if we did put it on the market that we could expect to actually GET this valued price?
I was told by a fairly cynical friend that agents may give an inflated price in their valuation so you’ll choose to sell with them, but then your property won’t sell as the price is too high, so they encourage you to lower the price, and so on…ugh. We don’t really want that.
And on a related but slightly off topic note – you know how some people put their property on the market just to test the market? But they don’t actually intend to sell it? What the hell is that about!? What if they got someone who fell in love with their property and wanted to seriously buy it?? Do they put in an offer only to be told that it’s not actually for sale, but was just a TEST? How horrible!