Austin Real Estate

Austin Real Estate Buy Your Home Reports How to Avoid Overpaying for Your Home

How to Avoid Overpaying for Your Home

What Have Similar Properties Sold For In This Area?

You'll have a definite advantage by reviewing the selling price of comparable houses in the same area(s) as the ones you are interested in.

Specifically, you want to look at total square footage, lot size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, type and age of construction, garage space, amenities such as a fireplace, pool, deck, etc.

If you are looking to buy a home in a subdivision with relatively similar homes, then finding this information will be easier because your agent can use the price of an exact or very similar model to do your comparison.

Web sites with publicly available information are not generally reliable, especially in Texas, where by law sale prices are not made public. Your real estate agent, however, will be able to access actual sales data easily through Multiple Listing Service (MLS).

MLS

The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is used by all licensed Realtors. Through this service, the agent can locate all types of information about a specific property. The actual MLS is still only available to licensed agents. However, similar information is available to the public through Web sites such as Realtor.com. These sites can give you a general feel for the asking prices in a given area, but cannot tell you how much those homes eventually sell for. Therefore, you will not know whether the home was actually over- or under-priced.

For properties that have already sold, only a real estate agent can gain access to this information to help you determine the appropriate offer.

Public Record

Unlike many other states, sale prices in Texas are NOT a matter of public record. Therefore, only a licensed real estate agent will have accurate information about the price of homes sold. County tax appraisers do not have sold prices either, meaning that tax appraisals do not necessarily reflect a home's actual value.

Pending Transactions

Obviously getting your hands on information from a house sold one month ago opposed to six months ago is far more valuable, especially in a rapidly changing market. Since there is no record of the sale price (even for your agent) until a house has actually sold, this makes getting accurate information a little tricky.

The reason for this is that the seller is protected should the transaction not go through and the property would go back on the market. By knowing what the buyer accepted on the first accepted offer, new buyers would have a huge advantage the second time the house goes on the market. They would have the upper hand over the seller in knowing what the house sold for and what the buyer is likely to accept.

However, your real estate agent may be able to obtain the price information on the sale that fell through by conferring with another agent, as a professional courtesy.

Summary

The bottom line is that analyzing comparable information should be a huge part of your overall home-buying process. Look for recent sales in the area you are interested in, the specific house you like, and determine if you have a motivated seller. If a seller has been transferred for a job, or if the house belonged to an elderly mother who just passed away, they may be willing to be more flexible on the selling price.