How to find out what it is worth without putting it on the market

The answer, straight away

You can have a property valued without instructing anybody to sell it and without the fact becoming known. A valuation is not an instruction, and anybody who works properly writes that down.

What you need are two different things, often confused: what it is worth on paper, and what somebody would pay now. The first comes from data, the second from the buyers who exist at this moment.

One: completed sales, not asking prices

This is the most important distinction. Asking prices tell you what sellers hope for; completed prices tell you what buyers paid.

The second have to be obtained; the first are visible to anybody. A valuation built on the first is not a valuation.

Two: the cost of rebuilding today

Land, permissions, construction cost per square metre in your municipality, professional fees, time.

On a protected property or one inside a historic centre the answer is often that it could not be rebuilt at any price. That is worth knowing, and almost nobody calculates it.

Three: the specific corrections

Orientation, noise, privacy from the neighbouring property, parking, the state of the services, planning and cadastral regularity.

These are the items that move the figure most, and no automatic valuation considers them.

Four: the demand that exists now

How many matching requirements the agent holds, and how long those people have been looking.

It is the difference between a theoretical number and a number somebody would pay.

Why online calculators are not enough

They work where there are many similar transactions, which means standard residential. Above a certain figure comparable transactions are few and each has a story, so an average of a handful of different numbers says nothing.

They are not useless: they give an order of magnitude. They tell you whether you are thinking about five hundred thousand or two million, not what to ask.

How to protect yourself while valuing

Ask in writing that the valuation carries no instruction and that the data is not shared. Do not have photographs taken at this stage. Where discretion matters, ask for a document rather than an announced site visit.

What to do with the answer

If the figure convinces you, you have a basis for deciding calmly. If it disappoints you, you have learned something useful before exposing the property, at the moment when that information costs least.

The worst way to discover what a house is worth is to publish it and wait six months.