Five Web Tips for Home Sellers

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Five Web Tips for Home Sellers

Selling your home is never fun. But here are some simple online steps to make it easier — and potentially more lucrative

By JEREMY CAPLAN

Posted Monday, Jun. 12, 2006

Putting your home on the market used to mean calling up your neighborhood broker and sticking a sign on the lawn. These days the savviest sellers log on to a growing network of real estate sites for help estimating their home's value and maximizing its appeal. Here are five ways to make the best use of the Web to get more for your home.

1) Check Your Home's Value

Plug your address into Zillow.com and RealEstateABC.com to get rough estimates of your home's market worth. Then refine the estimates by entering in more info. about the renovations you've done or about other factors that may affect the home's value. Added an extra bathroom? That'll boost your estimate. Even if you've just built in bookshelves or added a garden, Zillow has a space to input that as well. At RealEstateABC.com, you can adjust the site's valuation by noting whether your house has a better than average view, or if your street is particularly quiet. Just over half of the country's 85 million single-family homes have Zillow estimates, and the site employs statisticians to refine its formula for calculating home prices. The valuation the site suggests won't necessarily determine your offering price, but it should give you a helpful ballpark figure so neither brokers nor buyers can steer you wildly astray.

2) Find an Agent

Given that 90% of sellers use a broker, you'll probably end up with one too. Homethinking.com is a new site that lets you see what homes agents in your area are selling and what they've recently sold. It also posts ratings from past clients, though the site is too new to include a comprehensive database of such evaluations. It's still raw, but it's free and easy to use. After getting a quick overview covering some of your area's agents, visit Realtor.com, the site for the National Association of Realtors, to search for a local broker and to find out more about the home sale process. Finally, to see how the Web is changing the way some agents operate, go to ziprealty.com, which lets sellers save 25% on broker commissions.

3) Consider Selling it Yourself
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