How to evaluate or price a condo unit

When running a valuation or trying to determine the best listing price for a unit in a condo building, there are several factors one needs to take into consideration. To begin with, recent market trends should be accounted for – whether sale prices are rising or listing inventory is low, for example. A broker’s personal knowledge and experience will play a key role especially when it is complemented by accurate and up-to-date real estate data, such as:

• Recent sales of similar condo units.
• Active for sale inventory.
• Other elements that will affect the price, such as the physical condition of the unit, the building amenities/fees, and the location.

In order to help you with this complex process, we’ve put together a series of tools that can quickly deliver the data you need to base your decision on:

1. Comparables

• Sales within the building

Looking at sales within the same building is often the starting point and can provide the most accurate data for determining the best listing price. However, since even units within a building can differ a lot in terms of layout, lighting, or views, it is even better to look at units in the same line and on similar floors.

When available, this type of information will be displayed in our Units & Related Parcels section of property reports. You can choose a floor or line and expand it in order to check for recent sales that may qualify.

Further, you can choose to run a comparable sales search within the building only.

You can use any unit in a building as the subject property of your valuation; in this example, we used Unit B0803 from the Manhattan House Condominium at 200 East 66 Street.

Go to our Comparables tool and just make sure to select ‘New York City Condos’ under Property type and choose radius as ‘Just This Building’. You can then enter any optional criteria so that your search results will be relevant for your subject property, such as: square footage or number of bedrooms or bathrooms.

The results will then be generated based on your criteria, together with a Valuation Dashboard showing key sales stats. You can then further customize your search by including/ excluding results or by adding/removing columns before you save or print the results.

• Other comparable condo sales

Ideally, using sales within the building would be the best solution for determining the listing price of a unit, which will work very well in the case of new developments or buildings with high sales activity. However, with resale condos, you might need to look outside the building as well in order to find comparable sales.

In this case, you can use our advanced filtering options in order to get results that are relevant: unit size, year built or other criteria that you may find useful based on your subject property’s characteristics. As for the area to include in your search, you can go by radius, neighborhood or even draw your own area on the map with our polygon tool, which will give you the flexibility of selecting the exact area you wish to consider.

2. Active condos for sale inventory

After having looked at recently closed sales of similar units, the same approach should be taken with active for sale listings. This will help you determine how market supply and demand can be used to determine the value of your unit. You definitely need to be aware of the competition the listing will get once on the market, while also finding those elements that will make your listing stand out among the others.

You can run your search on Point2Homes by first selecting your main options: location, property type, unit size, and a price range to include:

Plus, there are some additional criteria you can enter for better filtering of the results, for example the year built, the listing date, or whether there’s an upcoming open house scheduled.

You can even search by a keyword (pool, gym, view, etc) in order to look at how units with similar amenities are priced.

3. Other factors that might influence the price.

Besides looking at recent sales and active for sale listings, there are other elements that may influence the sale price of units. We’ve already mentioned elements such as the view, exposure, building amenities and fees. After you’ve adjusted your valuation based on these elements and taken into consideration any improvements that have been made to the condo unit, there are some other things we suggest you check:

• The property’s proximity to the subway: this can make a significant difference in pricing since areas that have seen huge price increases often follow the subway map. In order to help you quickly determine how the unit stands in this respect, we have created a Subway Accessibility Map
• The school district the property is zoned for, which you can also view on our maps. Browse through our collection of school proximity and districts here.
• Pre-foreclosure and foreclosure activity in the area as it may affect the health of the market and have a negative influence on the sale price of a property.
• Other potentially attractive community features such as bike facilities, public facilities or parking availability in the area. It is also useful to be aware of any issues that might negatively impact the sale, for example toxic sites or crime incidents in the area. Look through our full maps collection here and choose those that might be of interest in your case.

If you have any questions while using our tools, our awesome team of Customer Support professionals is available to assist you with any inquiries, 7 days a week from 9 am to 5 pm ET at 718-715-1758 or [email protected]