Are you just about to do an appraisal on your home, and you aren’t sure how to prepare? Don’t worry – you’re not alone in this situation. Many people struggle to understand what they should do when preparing for an appraisal and have a hard time getting the help necessary to thrive. That said, you don’t have to go into this process blind and end up with a home that just doesn’t meet your needs as a person.
Instead, you can take the steps below to enhance your home and make it worth more money. These steps are common throughout the appraisal world and will give your home the boost in value you want and deserve.
But, just as importantly, it will also create the long-lasting and high-quality protection that many homes need from various types of decay and other concerns. In this way, you can craft the incredible home that you want and save yourself a lot of money in the appraisal process, too.
Step One: Don’t Ignore Your Yard – Easy Cleaning Steps That WORK
Before you move into your home and start doing simple steps to repair and upgrade its interior, you need to focus on the exterior. Curb appeal is essential for appraisal professionals, and they’ll take a look at the outside of your home and quickly judge it before they move indoors.
Unfortunately, this could cause them to downgrade the rest of your home further and trigger many issues with finances. These minor concerns can add up on your appraisal.
Therefore, it is essential to seriously consider working on your yard before your appraisal professional ever shows up. Doing so helps to clean up any debris that might be in the way of making your home worth more money.
These steps also show the appraisal professional that you care about your yard and home and will do anything possible to make them stand out. Just a few steps to take include how you can:
- Upgrade Your Landscape – Make sure that you trim all of the trees in your yard. It would help if you also crafted your shrubs and shrubbery to make them more appealing and engaging. Just as significantly, you can add different flowers and plants throughout your yard to get a better look and feel for its design.
- Renovate Your Exterior Bricks – Do you have a large number of bricks that look great outside of your home but may need an upgrade? Try to clean them up, add new decorative elements, or work with brick masonry service professionals who can create the high-quality look that appraisers will appreciate.
- Plant Trees – Trees and other growths in your yard will make it more attractive and provide many long-term benefits for lawn management, such as more shade to decrease your home’s heating and cooling bills. But, again, an arborist is an excellent option because these professionals will pick trees that make sense for you.
- Improve Your Fixtures – Do you have many fixtures outside your house that could probably use a slight upgrade? Then try to add new lighting elements or other decorative items to make your yard stand out. Contact an electrician if you work with any electricity to minimize your potential risk of shock.
When you craft your yard in this way, you should always work with landscape contractors who understand how to execute these steps. While it is often a good idea to contact high-quality professionals though, you may want to do as many of these options on your own as possible.
If you can handle some of these simple steps without contacting experts, you can save yourself even more cash. And that’s never a bad thing!
Step Two: Increase Your Appraiser’s Comfort
Before you start doing many more steps in this process, it is a good idea to do what you can to increase the comfort of your home. These steps will welcome your appraiser into the house with open arms and work subtly on them.
Often, they’ll be so impressed by these small steps that they’ll value your home higher. While not strictly necessary, these simple things do help out in many unique ways.
As a result, it is a solid move to add a few comfort elements to your home and take a few steps to make your appraiser’s visit a happier and more relaxing one. You shouldn’t spend too much money on these steps, mind you, or do anything you weren’t already going to do to improve your home’s value.
Instead, it would help if you focused on things that subtly improve a home’s comfort and impress appraisers. You can take steps like:
- Set Your Air Conditioning Properly – Try to create a comfortable interior environment in your home when your appraiser visits. If they feel comfortable, they’ll believe that the house is relaxing and are likely to give you a higher value without even realizing it.
- Put Your Pets Away – It doesn’t matter if Mr. Bow Wow is the friendliest dachshund or if Larry the Dog is the best rottweiler on the planet. Appraisers don’t want to see pets, so put yours away for a few hours by taking them to a friend’s. And clean up any pet hair you might have around the place.
- Put in Comfortable Seating – Your appraiser is not likely to sit down a whole lot when they’re visiting you. However, there is a chance that they might need a break and, if they do, have comfortable chairs waiting for them. This comfortable seating also makes your home worth more money.
- Enhance Your Roofing – Is your roof in rough shape and leaving leaks behind that could cause severe issues with your appraiser’s visit? Then call a roofer who will upgrade your home’s roof, fix any leaks, and take care of these problems long before your appraiser ever arrives at your home.
- Boost Your Bathroom’s Style – Make sure to contact bathroom remodeling companies to upgrade your home’s interior appliances. Making your bathroom more attractive not only increases its value but pleases the appraiser, providing you with many benefits you wouldn’t expect otherwise.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a few extra steps to make your appraiser feel comfortable and at home in your house. Some people might claim that this is an attempt to bribe the appraiser.
Nothing of the sort! Showing your appraiser that you care about their comfort shows them that you take extra steps to make your home appealing to others. And it helps to make your house feel more comfortable and valuable, as well.
Step Three: Start Fixing Major Elements in Your Home
At this point, you need to start upgrading your home to make it more appealing and attractive to your appraisal professional. Typically, there are many steps that you can take and should take.
However, you should also avoid spending too much money, as well, because you may end up not getting that much value back for your home. Just a few steps that you can take here include how you can:
- Fix Up Loose Boards – Do you have any loose boards in your home that your appraisal may trip over? Make sure that you fix them up and get them smooth and level again. If you’re clever with this approach, you should pay no more than the cost of a board and some tools.
- Improve Door Bell – Does your doorbell operate poorly or fail to ring at various times? Then, you might want to consider getting a new one installed instead. Doing so will help cut back on your expenses and give your appraiser a good touch of what you have to offer.
- Enhance Rain Gutters – Your rain gutters are more important than you may think, as they can cause foundation damage if they let water leak against the side of your home. Don’t let this happen to you! Instead, you must reach out to professionals or get up on your roof and improve your gutter strength.
- Fix All Your Leaks – Pay attention to the leaks throughout your home and take steps to repair them as soon as possible. You may need to contact a plumber to do these steps, but it is more than worth it. Your appraisal professional will greatly appreciate a home with a better plumbing system – we promise.
- Upgrade Your Safety Equipment – Go through your home and check the batteries to all of your smoke, carbon monoxide, and security alarms. Are they updated? If not, replace them with new batteries, even if the old ones still work okay. Also, replace broken or outdated fire extinguishers in the home.
- Replace Broken Window Panes – Ensure that the glass in your windows and doors is upgraded and replaced to minimize any problems with your appraisal. Many appraisal professionals will grade your home harshly if you aren’t careful about this step and don’t pay attention to this type of damage.
Take these steps, and your appraisal process should go more smoothly. Just as importantly, your appraisal professional will feel comfortable and ready to give you a great value on your home
However, you also need to make sure that you understand what is known as the $500 rule. We’ll discuss this issue in the next section to make your appraisal worth more value to you as a homeowner.
Step Four: Know What Upgrades are Worth It
Upgrading your home is a necessary process that requires you to fully understand the different factors that go into the home valuation. Just as importantly, you need to know what upgrades will add real value to your home.
For example, don’t make the mistake of just adding a new countertop because you think it will impress an appraiser. Instead, you need to know what upgrades make the grade for your home appraisal.
Here’s a tip: home appraisal professionals often measure home increments in $500 and rarely dip below that. As a result, you need to make sure that you focus on repairs and upgrades under $500 or provide at least $500 in benefits.
Which upgrades will help you out in this way? That all depends on many factors, such as what you feel comfortable doing and what steps you want to take.
For example, cabinet painting is relatively simple for most people to do themselves and can often be done for well under $200, let alone $500. However, it is also true that home painters will do the job much better than the average homeowners, meaning it may be a good idea to get experts to handle it instead.
Therefore, it is critical to make sure that you balance these factors before you take any renovation steps before an appraisal. Doing so gives you the edge that you need.
We strongly suggest that you talk to your realtor about these steps to decide which is right for you. We’ll include a good list of different options here for you to consider.
You can then take away from them what you want, deciding if these steps are right for you or if you’re going to try something else. Just a few things that you can do to improve your home’s value before you get an appraisal done include:
- Adding new and more appealing light fixtures throughout your home’s interior and exterior
- Buffing and polishing your hardwood floors and repairing loose fibers on your carpets
- Shining all of your decorative metal objects in your home to look as good as possible
- Making all of your beds, dusting all of your furniture, and carefully vacuuming your rugs
Simple steps like these will add value to your home in subtle ways. The appraiser may not notice them right away, but their cumulative effect is significant.
Over time, it is possible that you could end up doing many, many minor upgrades and enhancements that add well over $500 or more to the value of your home. Your appraiser may not even realize you have done anything to impress them.
As you can see, getting a great value out of your home requires understanding the appraisal process and approaching it with ease and understanding. You also need to make sure you fully grasp the unique elements that go into your home’s appraisal. If you do, you’ll be easily satisfied with your home’s value. If you don’t, you’ll end up struggling to get the deal that you want and deserve from a house.
