The average price of property in the UK has risen drastically, and that may be good news for some and bad news for others. With the average price of property in the UK increasing by a whopping 7.2 per cent from January 2022 to January 2023, homeowners have turned out to be clear winners. In February 2013, the average price of property in England was around £178,000 and this amount has almost doubled in a decade, making the average price of property reach £308,300 in February 2023. If you’re enjoying riding the property wave and have found yourself wondering about the worth of your home, here are 5 ways to gauge your home’s appreciation value.
1 Use free online valuation tools
There are so many free valuation tools available online, most of which give a pretty accurate valuation. Websites like Rightmove, Zoopla and On The Market provide instant free valuations to help you determine the worth of your property. All you need to provide are simple details such as the pin code, the street or location, the size of your home, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and any other important features. And just like that, you will know the approximate value of your home in real time, within minutes. With that being said, estate agents in Doncaster want to point out that online valuations are not 100 per cent accurate, you have to assume a 4 to 5 per cent margin of error.
2 Get in touch with an estate agent
The best way to find out the current value of your home is by getting in touch with an estate agent. The reason estate agents say that online valuation tools have a certain margin of error is that these tools use basic details to give an approximate value of your home. When you ask an estate agent for a valuation, he or she will take additional factors such as outdoor space, transportation links, distance to a good school, recent renovations and new additions into account. For instance, something as small as an original fireplace or a brand-new kitchen will add to the value of your home. Local estate agents have a fair idea of the market trends, the demand and supply as well as the latest prices, making their valuation pretty accurate.
3 Research the selling price of similar homes
If you are just slightly curious about the value of your home and want to figure out how much it has appreciated over time, you can always do your own research. Go online and look for similar homes in your area. Say, you live in a four-bedroom house in Manchester with a private garden. You are going to want to look at other such houses in the same area and see what selling price is listed for these homes. You will probably find hundreds of such homes in your area, so you need to try to find a few properties which are the most similar to your home and calculate their average selling price to figure out how much your home has appreciated in value.
4 Understand price trends
If you bought your home in 2003, then you will need to research the price trends of the past 20 years in your area to find out the current value of your home. Let’s say, you bought your home a house in Doncaster in 2020. The value of a detached house in Doncaster in 2020 was £238,000 on average, and this number had risen to £273,000 by 2022; that means the value of your home has risen by approximately £5,000. Again, since these figures are based on the total average, you will need to learn more about local price trends to find out the true value of appreciation.
5 Look at homes that have been sold near you
Another way to calculate the value of your home is by looking at properties that have been sold in your area. You can use websites like Rightmove and Zoopla or even use the official government Land Registry website to find out how much a property has been sold for in the past. Usually, a property that has been sold will take two to three months to appear on the list, so you may have to add or subtract a little based on the price trends in the last 2 to 3 months to figure out the current value.