Other than staging and prepping your home for sale, one of the most stressful aspects of selling your home is pricing it effectively for the market.
The first step in pricing your home effectively is to recruit a qualified, experienced Realtor to help you run comparative pricing, or comps, on your home. Your agent will have access to records of homes that have sold in your neighborhood in the recent past, and how much they sold for. Oftentimes, these comps are the single best indicator of what your home will sell for.
There’s a delicate art to pricing a home. You want to give your home the best price possible right off the bat. Studies show that the first two weeks on the market are a critical time in the sale of a home. It will never have the benefit of “newness” going for it ever again. The current pool of buyers will have already passed it over, and only the trickle of new buyers coming into the market daily will be interested. Capitalize on that newness by making your first price, the right price.
How do you do this? You have to strike a balance between what’s a good deal for you and what’s a good deal for the buyer. Mostly, your price needs to reflect what the market will bear. It doesn’t matter what you owe on the house, how much you have put into it, or what kind of profit you want to make off of it. Things that DO matter include the inventory of homes for sale in your neighborhood, its desirability to buyers based on features and condition, and even what time of year it happens to be… spring is the best time to sell a house; winter is regarded as the worst.
You may be tempted to price your house higher than you are actually looking to get for it, thinking that buyers will negotiate down. What often happens, instead, is that buyers either pass your house over completely or walk away despite interest because they view the price of the house as just too high.
Some suggestions for pricing your house: price it just below what experts call a “century mark.” Instead of asking $1,000,000, for example, ask $999,990. Although there is a nominal difference between the two numbers, the second one looks lower. It’s a psychological trick that is used often in retail pricing. Also, consider the “price bands” in which your buyers are likely to be looking. Pricing your house at $254,999 doesn’t make as much sense as pricing at $249,999, because that way you will “catch” buyers who place $250,000 as their upper limit on home searches.
There is definitely an art to selling your home, and finding good help to get you through the process is vital. Good luck, and happy selling!
