Can you get your house valued by an estate agent if you don't really intend to sell?

[NorbertDentressangle]

We would like to find out the value of our house and also get an idea as to what it would be worth if we converted an outbuilding into accommodation (or indeed if its even worth considering this).

Will an estate agent come and look and give us a value and/or advice about the possible conversion or are they not interested unless you are seriously looking at selling?

You could get them to do an evaluation but you don't have to put it on the market....say you are not happy with the price and will wait a year after they have done it.

tell them you're interested in selling after you've done the conversion? The ones in our area would happily to do it with a view to keeping up the relationship to get your custom in the future, I think.
Anyway we have 3 come to value our house this week (we are probably going to sell) and it was not hard to get them so I suspect they are not too busy at the moment....
Given that asking for 3 valuations is normal they clearly do valuations all the time which don't end in an instruction for them.

Yes, I did this the other day because I was bored!

yes ofcourse, tell them you are getting afew quotes to decide if it's worth putting on the market

I did wonder they would do it for the good relationship bit, hoping we would go back to them in the future.

I guess I just feel a bit guilty about not being entirely honest.

Also, its a small town and I don't want them running down the street after me every time I walk past their window asking if we're ready to sell yet

lol mistressploppy -I do some strange things when I'm bored but luring estate agents to my house isn't one of them!!

I range local agents and told them I wanted a valuation because we were trying to decide between selling and extending. They were more than happy to attend and didn't really try the hard sell on me. Embarrassingly though the guy who came lives down the road and now I keep bumping into him and feeling guilty that so far we've neither sold nor even got building quotes .... but we're thinking about it!

madrush -did they give you an idea of current value plus potential value after extending?

We did this several years ago. Were completely honest that we needed their advice to help us make a decision.
(Turned out it hadn't increased in value since we'd bought it despite us spending about £15k on it. Adding the cost of changing the fixed price mortgage we decided to stay put - despite being absolutely broke.)
Five years later they've just sold it for us.

I did this recently but was entirely upfront with them. We are going to renovate and extend and we had a few layout options to chose from. I really wanted to know what the ceiling price was likely to be for our road.

The Agents were fab. They told me they do this kind of thing the whole time.

It does mean when we come to sell, as a starting point, I'm likely to chose one of them.

Yes - you would have to have it valued when changing your mortgage anyway.