I’m starting to think that I should call our real estate broker and get our house appraised!
Every week we receive a few promo flyers from the various real estate agents or companies that work in our area and the prices of houses around here have just gone up and up since we purchased our home in June of 2001.
One of the real estate flyers we got today is for an open house for a detached home less than a block away from my house. I know exactly which house it is, and even though it’s detached (small walkway between houses – which means no driveway, no garage etc) there’s no way that this house is any bigger than my own. In fact it might even be smaller.
Plus, we have a shared driveway. This house doesn’t even have a driveway! We’d have to share our drive with our neighbor if she had a car with maybe one of us parking on the street every second week or something, but at least we have a driveway and space between our houses!
Take a wild guess how much the asking price is?
$499,000! Uh huh. Really.
We bought our house 6 years ago for less than 200,000 and at that time it was a steal because the rest of the houses in the neighborhood were going at $250,000 plus. The owners needed to sell the house to move into their new retirement home by a certain date. That’s why we got such a great deal on a solid house – new roof, new windows, new water pipes. There was nothing we had to do to fix up the house.
So I figure our semi-detached house would go for about $400,000 – perhaps even without or reno complete!
Not that we are planning on moving anytime soon. I mean, if we moved we’d more than likely end up purchasing a house about the same size in the $400,000 + range since the market is high right now. We’d gain, but the new house would be expensive.
Still it’d be nice to get our home appraised just to see what it would be worth on todays real estate market. Unless a prospective buyer hates yard work of any kind I’m sure our landscaped front and backyard gardens would help set the price a bit higher too.
Have you ever had your home appraised just for the heck of it to see what it would be worth if you decided to sell?
I was thinking of doing this same thing. I paid a bargain price of $100,000 for my home with 5 acres. Houses around here are going triple that….I can’t imagine it being worth that much. It makes me smile….as you are probably smiling too.