Congratulations! You've decided to sell your home. It's a big step. It's also a pain: determining a price, making necessary repairs, keeping the house immaculate for the hordes of buyers who will be coming through, negotiating, finding a new place to live, and, finally, moving.
Where to begin? Are you sure you want to move? You are? O.K., then the first step is finding out what your house is worth in today's market. Forget your assessed value. In California, with Prop. 13, assessed value and market value have no relationship to each other anymore.
There are three methods to determine your homes value. First, go to the County Assessor's office and pour through their records looking for homes in your area similar to your own, then compare. This takes some time.
Second, pay a fee and get a report from a data company, like DataQuick, which collect the data from the County Recorder's and/or Assessor's office and put it into their computers. The fees are nominal: $9.95—down from $19.95; but, the data may be suspect and it is raw data.
The data may be suspect for several reasons. If the data collection company uses the County Recorder's data, the data itself may have been falsely submitted. Information on the price of homes is based on tax stamps. People have been known to hide the stamps so no one else can find out, or, they buy a higher amount of stamps thereby showing a higher recorded price for the property. The county assessor's office is immune from this tampering. Ask the data collection company which source they use for their reports.
Another reason the data may be suspect is simple transcription errors.
The third method of finding your home's current market value is FREE*! Just call a local agent, like us, and we'll provide you an accurate, up-to-date report. The advantages of using a local agent over the data companies is we know the properties in question. We can, usually, tell you why a home sold for the price it did; what had to be done to the house to sell it; what was left undone and thereby affected the price—all the little nuances that come in handy when the negotiating begins.
Here is our form for your personalized market analysis. Please provide as much information as possible and press the What's it worth? button at the end. We will do our research and contact you as soon as possible.
We've prepared a report Getting Your Home Ready to Sell. Follow the suggestions in this report and you will get the best price for your home. Also, you might find my report for buyers interesting, Buying a Home in California. It details the steps in the buying/selling process. Although it is written for buyers, it has a lot of pertinent information for sellers.
Pre-defined searches, all homes for sale in:
Palm Desert South
Palm Desert North
Palm Desert East
Palm Desert Country
Clubs
Palm Desert Gated Communities
Non-gated Golf Communities
Not in a development
Palm Springs Central
Palm Springs North
Palm Springs South
Rancho Mirage
Country Clubs
Gated Communities
Non-gated Communities
Not in a development
Indian Wells
Golf Country
Clubs
Non-gated Communities
Gated Communities
Not in a development
