5 hidden factors that can influence the sales price of your home

Most homeowners appreciate that things such as location, crime and neighborhood comps can have a big impact on the price of their home when they come to sell it. But few realize that there are other, just as important factors that can also influence the price.

In a new analysis, real estate data analytics firm HouseCanary identifies five hidden factors that can have a direct impact on your home’s value.

HouseCanary said the following five factors have the biggest impact:

1. The view angle from the backyard: The maximum angle that opens up to scenery or nature from your backyard (measured from no scenic view at all from your backyard to 180 degrees, indicating that the view is scenic from every angle).

2. Frontage length: The length in feet of the street-facing side of the home’s lot. (Frontage length was tied to an increase in home values.)

3. Backyard exposure to neighbors: The measurement of how easily neighbors can see into a home and backyard. Privacy from neighbors was found to be an asset.

4. Privacy: Researchers factored in backyard slope, distance to neighbors, home density, and other metrics to determine a privacy score. (The more private, the more desirable.)

5. Backyard slope: Researchers measured the slopes of the backyards to determine the influence. Homes with downhill-sloping backyards tend to be more desirable than homes with backyards that slope uphill.

According to HouseCanary, backyard views are incredibly important. Those counties where more homes have wider backyard viewing angles tended to see higher prices, which shows that buyers place a premium on this feature.

Meanwhile, homes with a large frontage length saw their values boosted in 80 percent of the counties analyzed by HouseCanary. “Counties in the South tend to place higher relative importance on frontage length,” wrote HouseCanary’s EVP of Analytics Alex Villacorta. “Frontage length is going to be a bigger driver of home value in Charlotte, S.C., or Athens, Ga., than it is in Salt Lake City or in San Francisco.”

Another interesting finding is that most buyers would rather not be able to see into their neighbor’s backyard, as they value privacy, the study found. A lack of backyard privacy is a negative factor that can reduce a home’s value.

“The more backyard that was exposed to neighbors, the lower the home’s value,” Villacorta concluded. “This was especially clear in the Northeast, which seems to place more importance on limiting backyard exposure than other parts of the country.”