How Much Should I Pay For a House?

The house you are interested in may be marketed with or without a price - the only thing the price indicates is the vendor's expectations. Whether these expectations are realistic, is for you to decide. You may think you have a good idea of what a house is worth, but it never hurts to do a bit more research.

If you want to get the experts in, a registered property valuation can be done and costs from $500. If there have been some sales in the area that you think were comparable, ring the listing agent. If the sales are now unconditional agents should be happy to tell you what the sale prices were.

If you want reliable house sale information Quotable Value (QV) has some great online resources - some of the information available on this site is free to access.

We recommend you buy a recent or local sales report from QV as these reports will give you the addresses of a number of recent sales near your chosen address.

Take the report and go for a drive, note the differences you can see between the houses. Take into account, location, street appeal, exterior presentation and building type. The reports will give you floor area, age, rateable value, sale price and sale date, and you can use all this information to compare houses and to make up your mind about price.

The online 'valuer' reports do not give an accurate enough estimate of market value to be relied on, but they can be useful as they contain an 'all you need to know' range of information about a house which includes comparable sales, sales history and more.

Sometimes the rateable value (government valuation of the house) has a strong relationship with price for an area i.e. in Palmerston North, in February 09, houses were selling within 1% of their rateable value. In areas like these, the rateable value can give you a good idea of price. But you should only use the rateable value in combination with other information, like your own experience or a registered valuation. You can find out rateable value information on your local council's website for free.

Before settling on a price, make sure you have done a second inspection and checked around the house again, as you may have missed something that significantly affects the value. Here is our second inspection checklist to help you out.
 
 




 
 

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