6 Tips to Get a Higher Valuation on Your Home Appraisal

Whether you want to refinance your home or sell it completely, getting a high appraisal should be one of your key priorities. While you may have heard a few stories from acquaintances and friends who’ve had less than optimal Boulder painting, you don’t have to go through the same thing.

Read on to find out what you can do to get a higher appraisal for your house.  

Find Out if the Appraiser is a Local

Here’s why it’s important to ask your appraiser if he’s local; you want the value of your house to be determined in relation to its location and a non-local appraiser may not understand enough about your community to make an accurate estimate.  

Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to ask for another appraiser, as lenders source appraisers by sending out an email notification to the appraisers in their list with the hope that one of them will take the job and accept the terms and payment offered. As such, your lender will hire the first appraiser who responds to the email and if they’re from out of town, then tough luck for you.

However, what you can do once you’ve found out that your appraiser is from out of town, is to familiarize yourself with your local market as much as possible, so that you can confidently enlighten them about your local area during the valuation process.

Clean Up

As they say, ‘first impressions last’, and the best way to make a good first impression is to ensure that your house is clean and neat when the appraiser arrives. While they may not spend more than an hour viewing the property, finding a well-kept home will definitely give them a positive outlook as they go about doing the evaluation.

So, declutter and deep clean all the rooms, and make sure that everything looks and smells fresh. Also, be hospitable and offer to give them any information that they may need.

Don’t Forget the Outdoor Areas

Boulder painters are not just about the internal area of your home. Your appraiser will want a tour of the outdoors as well. That’s why you need to prepare by mowing your lawn for example in San Diego, picking up dead leaves or plants, and shoveling your walkways and driveways so that the house is clean and welcoming even from the outside. Your dog may have left a little present in the backyard, so you might want to pick that up, and make sure to tidy up kids’ toys and any other items that may be lying around misplaced.

Make a List of Improvements You’ve Made

At this point, you’ve probably had some upgrades done to help boost the value of your home. As such, you should make a list of all the improvements you’ve made, including receipts that show the amount you spent as well as the date on which the items were bought and installed.

Make a Cheat Sheet

A cheat sheet is basically a document that details the dimensions and measurements of all the rooms, including a description of all the upgrades that you’ve made – big or small. This will make the appraiser’s job easier and give them a reliable reference to use when evaluating your house.

Explain the Comps

Ask your real estate agent to give you a list of recently sold homes in your area, complete with before and after images, as well as the selling price. Then, proceed to point out particular details about the homes that have affected the price, but aren’t included in the general sale information.

This includes things like the condition of the property and whether or not it has outdated furniture or structural damage to it at the time of the sale. All of these small details will affect the value of your house, and yet they’re hardly mentioned when Boulder house painters is done.

Giving your appraiser this additional information will broaden their perspective and enable them to recommend a fair selling price that’s based on your own property’s condition and not just on the average selling price of the homes in your area.