[Charleston] buyers, sellers and home values
It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that home sellers feel that their home is worth more and that home buyers feel that a home they are considering buying is worth less. So how do you determine the real value of a home anyway and come up with a value in order to make a realistic offer that the seller will accept and the buyer feels is a fair price.
One thing that buyers are doing before even viewing a home these days is digging into the tax records and finding out what the seller paid and when and determining whether the seller is even being realistic with the asking price.
And if you bought your home in the last few years, I'm sorry but it has not increased in value by 10 percent just so that you can break even on the sale of your home.
But a lot of homes are listed for sale in the Charleston MLS with just that pricing strategy. FAIL.
More than likely (and only because the Charleston real estate market has held up fairly well), the value of a home purchased during the peak of the housing boom has probably declined by 10 percent and if you happened to really overpay a few years ago, then the decline would be even worse.
One way to value homes is to compare what recently sold homes previously sold for. So to use the example from the sales history graphic above, if another home in the neighborhood sold for about $385,000 in the summer of 2003 and recently sold for $480,000, then this home you might be considering is probably worth about the same. But if that home sold for for $420,000 during the summer of 2003, then the home you might be considering is probably worth $35,000 less than the recent sales price of $480,000 or closer to $445,000.