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Price Your Home With Your Brain, Not With Your Heart

The correct price is absolutely the #1 marketing tool you have to help sell your house quickly and for top dollar.

Certainly this is about the biggest and most critical decision you will make when listing yout property; and all too often the very real emotions of valuing something so personal can cloud a home seller’s judgment.

When you are ready to list your property, your agent will present you with comparable sales data, and you need to take a very close look at this information. The statistics don’t lie. This information will likely include:

  • ACTIVE LISTINGS – This is your competition. Put yourself in a buyers shoes; if you price your home well above the rest of the properties, what would make them want to pay more? Pricing too high will help to sell the other houses as it will make them look like the better value.   Also, note how long the homes have been on the market.   If houses in your area are taking more than 30 days to sell, you definitely want to have a more attractive price.
  • PENDING SALES – These are the successful home sellers.   At what list price is your competition receiving offers?   These homes are perhaps your best gauge for a good list price.   Again, zero in on those that were on the market for under a month.
  • EXPIRED LISTINGS – These are the properties that were rejected by home buyers.   While there are a few reasons this can happen, the most common is that the seller was unrealistic about the price. Look at the history – even if the last price was reasonable, the house may have originally been priced so high that corrections over time were not enough to bring the buyers back in.
  • SOLD COMPARABLES – These are what an appraiser will use to determine your home’s value.   It can be difficult for him to appraise your home at a price above the highest comparable.

You should also take a look at the market statistics in your area overall…

  • How many homes like yours are on the market currently?
  • How many homes like yours sold in the past 6 months?

If 12 homes sold in the past 6 months, they are selling at a rate of 2/month.   If there are 24 homes currently on the market, that means there is a full year’s worth of inventory.   You want to present and price your home so that it is one of the first of those 24 homes to go under contract!

Yes, of course there are always exceptions and every home is unique; but a careful review of the current state of the market can help you apply some basic economics and take some of the emotion out of pricing your home.

Happy Selling!!

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