Pricing Your House For Sale!
Did you notice that I used the word “house” (or “condo unit”, “townhouse” etc.) instead of “home”? My choice of wording was no accident! For each of us, our “home” has an emotional attachment while “house” does not.
It is true that the buying decision is often laden with emotion, but when you are selling you have to remove the emotion from your decision making!
Potential buyers will often view MANY properties and compare the features of each before making a decision to purchase while you have but ONE property to offer for sale. In marketing your property to sell, you need to detach yourself from what makes your “house” your “home”!
1st , Pricing your “House” For Sale:
In order to price your house to sell within a reasonable amount of time, you need to consider:
a) Prices recently paid for properties similar to yours;
b) Current asking prices (and how long these properties have been offered) of properties that compete with yours;
c) Prices of properties similar to yours that are reported as “pending sales” (that is, those with contract offers!).
No matter how “nice” your house is, the price that a willing and informed buyer will offer will be consistent with prices recently paid for similar “nice” houses and the asking prices of similar “nice” houses now offered for sale!
I can assist you in arriving at the “right” asking price for your property!
2nd, The Danger of Listing Your House at Too High a Price:
Too often, the result of asking way too much for your property is this: No one will come and view your property! Period.
Some sellers will mistakenly price themselves out of the market and scare away prospective buyers! The thinking seems to be “well, a prospective buyer can always make an offer” but few will actually consider doing so! And, these prospective buyers may never even view your house because the price is just too high! And…the longer a property lingers on the market, there is some tendency for it to become “stigmatized” (as in: “something must be wrong with that property”) when the only problem has been that it is merely priced too high!
3rd, Professional Assistance is Establishing an Asking Price for your House:
Numerous times each and every week I find myself reviewing and analyzing market data from the MLS (that is, the Realtors’ “Multiple Listing Service”) in order to provide an opinion of the Anticipated Selling Price of a property.
I will provide you, the seller, with market data from the MLS that is relevant to correctly pricing your property. Together we can identify an acceptable asking price for your property!
To illustrate the importance of correctly pricing your property, I recently reviewed year 2006 sales data for single-family properties in 13 communities located in Cook, DuPage, and Kane counties.
I looked at the Average Asking Price at the time of sale and compared that to the Average Sales Price of these properties. Do you want to know what I learned? Well, the Average Sales Price was equal to 97.25% of the Average Asking Price! That is, these properties—on average—had a sales price WITHIN 3% of the asking price!
Thus, if we agree that your property has an Anticipated Selling Price of (for example) “$300,000”, we would not want to price it 10% (“$330,000”) higher than what we believe it should sell for!
SPECIAL NOTE: Pricing your property must take into consideration present and near-future market conditions (“are prices fairly stable?” OR are prices rapidly increasing?) that affect the price that a willing buyer will pay for your property. This is another way that I can assist you in receiving a fair and equitable price for your “house”!
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