How to study house prices—to strengthen your hand when buying or selling

The more prepared you are—the better you’ll feel about making these big decisions.

To give yourself the best chance of being comfortable about how much you’re going to be prepared to pay for your next house and how much you’re going to be willing to accept for the sale of your current house, you’ll want to do some serious ‘homework.’ If you start doing this several weeks or even months ahead of the day you have to face these decisions, you’ll be very relaxed and comfortable when the time comes.

You obviously want to have a very good idea about prices in your area, as well as prices in the area/s where you’re thinking about buying your next house.

You can build up your knowledge in several ways. One is to make it a standard practice to study the sales results published in the newspapers and on the Real Estate Institute of Victoria’s website. The REIV updates the sales results continuously and you can see the latest results every Monday on their website – http://www.reiv.com.au.

It will help you enormously if you can establish a routine of sitting down once a week or every fortnight with the newspaper or your computer and going through the sales results. Then writing down the key facts about relevant properties, those with the roughly the same accommodation and features as the house you’re selling, and those that have the accommodation and features you’ll be looking for in your next home. It’s extremely useful to keep a written log of sales, so that you can continue referring back to it from time to time. This will add tremendously to your knowledge and confidence about the market.

Now is not the time to call estate agents and get their estimates of value on your house – that comes a bit later. At this stage it is important for you to build up your own understanding of values independently of anyone else’s opinion. After all, it’s going to be you making the final decisions.

You can download our free Sales Data Worksheet for making notes on as you do your homework. The more disciplined you are about this, the better you’ll feel about things when the time comes for action.