Selling without an agent puts the pricing decision on you. It is the decision that determines how the rest of the sale goes, and it is the one where guessing is most expensive. Price above what the market supports and the property sits, gathers days on market, and eventually sells for less than a correctly priced listing would have. Price below it and you have paid for the mistake before you started.

An appraisal gives you an independent, documented opinion of value developed for your pricing decision, from someone with no commission riding on the outcome and no listing to win.

What you get, and what it is for

You are the client. The intended use is your decision about how to price and market the property. The report states the opinion of value, the comparable sales and market data behind it, and the reasoning connecting them — so you can see not just the number but which properties you are competing with and on what terms.

That last part is often the more useful half. Sellers frequently discover that the property they think they are competing with is not the one buyers are comparing them to.

If you want to show the report to buyers

This comes up often, and it needs to be handled at engagement rather than afterward. An appraisal developed for your pricing decision has you as the client and you as the intended user. Distributing it to prospective buyers as a marketing document puts it in front of people who were never intended users, for a use it was not developed for. That is not a matter of our preference — it is how intended use and confidentiality work under USPAP.

If you intend from the outset to share the report with buyers, tell us at engagement. We can identify that intended use in the assignment and develop the report accordingly. What we will not do is develop an appraisal for one purpose and let it be repurposed for another after the fact.

What an appraisal will not do for you

It will not market the property, list it, or generate buyer traffic. It will not tell you what the property will sell for — that depends on exposure, negotiation, and the buyer who shows up. And its conclusion will sometimes be lower than you hoped, in which case you have learned something valuable at a point where it is still cheap to act on.

Contact us to discuss your property and what an appraisal for a pricing decision involves.