Timmy Duggan, Nederland. A new tool called Homebot is taking the real estate industry by storm. It is an automated valuation system that uses public sales data in order to come up with a value for your home. These do exist other places, the most common being Zillow and the Zestimate, but this valuation model and service has a few more bells and whistles to it.
On top of the market valuation, the system calculates the net worth of your home. It does this by taking the loan amount and rate of your home and factoring that over the time period that it has been active for. This value minus the market value of your home generates the net worth. This isn’t exactly precise, but it gives you a very good estimate of the bigger picture.
With the loan amount, the system shows you how much money you have contributed toward the principle and toward the interest over time. It shows what you could potentially save or lose in interest over time if you re-financed your loan at current interest rates.
As an added bonus, it shows how much you could save over the life of the loan if you contributed just $100, $200, $300, etc. more to your mortgage each month. This is an interactive feature, so you can play around with how much more you can contribute and then see the total interest savings from this. The way they are calculating this is due to the fact that the extra $300 gets contributed directly to principal reduction and then the life of your loan shortens. As a good rule of thumb, you can reduce the life of your loan 6 to 7 years by simply making one extra payment per year.
The final numbers that this system shows you is rental rates and how much revenue is potentially available to you by renting your home. This can be done on a nightly Air BnB style rate, or it could be a full monthly rate. This you can play with as well to modify the nightly rates based on condition of your home or how many nights per month you might want to rent it out for.
In addition to calculating all these numbers, it is very easy to connect with a realtor such as ourselves to help verify the home value that the system has generated. We can produce a market analysis for you and have a more thorough discussion of value, as there are a lot of other factors that play into value than this model can accommodate for.
If this is something you might be interested in receiving each month, please let us know! All we need is the address of the home you want to receive this for and your email. From there you will receive this once a month and you can see how your home value changes over time!
Timmy Duggan is a Realtor & Trusted Real Estate Advisor with Boulder Property Network at RE/MAX of Boulder and can be reached at 303-589-3999 or through the website www.BoulderPropertyNetwork.com
(Originally published October 11, 2018, in the print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
