Article 4:   More Facts about a Property Valuer and Property Valuations

A Property Valuer is Used in Loan Applications, Home Buying / Home Selling, Transferring Property, Marriage Settlements, etc.

A property valuer helps to establish a property's market value - the likely sales price it would bring if offered in an open and competitive real estate market.

Market Value as defined by the International Valuation Standards Committee, and as adopted by the Australian Property Institute, is...

“...the estimated amount for which an asset should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s length transaction after proper marketing, wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion”.

Your lender will require a property valuation by a certified property valuer when you ask to use a home or other property as security for a loan, because it wants to make sure that the property will sell for at least the amount of money it is lending.

Don't confuse a comparative market analysis (or CMA) with a property valuation. Real estate agents use CMAs to help home sellers determine a realistic asking price. Experienced agents often come very close to a valuation figure with their CMAS, but an property valuer's report is much more detailed, and is the only valuation report a bank will consider when deciding whether or not to lend the money.

When a Property Valuer is Required?

A valuation report by a property valuer will be required for transferring property (stamp duty purposes). Example: between say, from parent to child / children, individual to self-managed super fund (SMSF) or from individual to a corporation.

When a marriage breaks down both parties could choose to sell the marital home and split the proceeds from the sale, or one party may want to buy the share of the home from other party. In any case, a property valuer would be called upon to provide an independent property valuation (sometimes also known as a sworn valuation).

Experienced property investors often use the services of a property valuer before making an offer / bidding at auction for a property. The valuation figure in the property valuation report provides a benchmark against which the prudent investor makes his/her decisions.

Before selling your home it is always a good idea to get a property valuation from an independent property valuer to set your selling price. This could be used in conjunction with a CMA or as a separate selling price indicator.

Whether a property valuer is used for pre-purchase or pre-sale purposes, the few hundred dollars invested could save you thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars.

Market Value vs Price

It is important to distinguish between Market Value and Price. A price obtained for a specific property under a specific transaction may or may not represent that property's market value: special considerations may have been present, such as a special relationship between the buyer and the seller, or else the transaction may have been part of a larger set of transactions in which the parties had engaged.

Another possibility is that a special buyer may have been willing to pay a premium over and above the market value, if his subjective valuation of the property (its investment value for him) was higher than the Market Value. An example of this would be the owner of an adjoining property who, by combining his own property with the subject property, could thereby obtain economies-of-scale (i.e. 'sum is greater than its parts'). When such situations arise in property markets, it is the task of the property valuer to judge whether a specific price obtained under a specific transaction is indicative of Market Value.