Know your home’s value now

What’s my house worth? It’s the first question you’ll ask yourself when you decide to sell.

The real answer, of course, is: What someone’s willing to pay for it. The marketplace will decide.

But you need to know now. You need some basis, some information, for making your decision about how much to ask for your home or how much to offer someone else for theirs.

Short of a crystal ball, your best bet is to find out what homes most directly comparable to yours have sold for recently. There is only one complete source for this information: the Manitoba Land Titles database. The real estate board’s listing service database that agents use contains only information on homes marketed through it. That’s no longer the whole market. Land Titles is the real deal.

Until now, an individual like you could only find out information about one home at a time from Land Titles. Useless for doing a market comparison.

But that’s changed. ComFree has joined with Home Valuations Canada to allow you to create a same-day, up-to-the-minute evaluation on any property at a cost of $29.95 plus tax. Click on the Home Valuations button you’ll find in several places on our www.comfree.com web site. The site is safe, secure and encrypted. Put in the address of the home you’re interested in and Home Valuations will email you a computer-generated report based on Land Titles’ database.

This will contain a suggested price and a high and low range. Their software takes into account thousands of transactions and gives the most weight to the most recent. Your report will also give the address of three direct comparables (soon to be 10) and a history of the subject property.

Click this button and take control

And before you commit to buying the report, Home Valuations will tell you whether it’s confident it has enough information on which to base a valid evaluation.

We think this is the cost-effective tool you’ve been waiting for, particularly when compared to the alternatives.

Only professional appraisers can provide actual appraisals, but they take days to complete, cost about $300 and are usually based on the incomplete real estate board’s database.

And anyone who has gotten real estate agents’ evaluations knows how wildly divergent their suggested asking price can be. It will depend on a given agent’s strategy. If he wants to flip the listing fast, he’ll come in with a lower price. Another agent who is afraid he won’t get the listing will come in high, thinking he can talk you down later.

But remember, the marketplace is a dynamic creature subject to change. Home Valuat-ions’ reports are based only on actual sales. Listing prices of homes on sale now are “wish prices.” They may be too high or too low. We think Home Valuations’ reports are your best resource for objective, unbiased real-time, real estate information.

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