Pricing your home appropriately from the beginning is critical to getting it sold quickly and at the highest price. Research shows that overpricing your home and then dropping the price several times while it languishes on the market usually leads to selling it at a much lower price than if you priced it correctly to begin with.
Many homeowners want to set their list price based on what they paid for their home, the balance of their mortgage or on the profit they want to make so they can move into another home. If you price your home too high, some potential buyers won’t want to look at it at all, while others will simply walk away without making an offer.
Here’s our company’s philosophy on pricing our listings. We are not giving away any secrets. We stand behind the listed price of any property we have and will gladly share our analysis with any prospective buyer or their Realtor. We are not appraisers. Realtors have to arrive at a value, bring two parties together and close it. Appraisers only have to bless it.
We start virtually every opinion of value by first looking at all of the actual sale prices on surrounding homes. Some Realtors will use “listed prices” to establish values but we don’t even look at them. Listed prices are like a car dealer’s MSRP. Pricing a home should never be what other sellers want for their homes, but what buyers have already paid for homes in the area.
Using the confirmed sale prices of surrounding homes helps us establish a range. If we are asked to price a home in Crestmoor built in 1952 with a pool and 9000 sq ft lot we will go to the MLS and run a search using those parameters.