As an agent, do you enjoy banging your head against a brick wall? If so, then helping a client through the process of pricing their property so that it will sell, rather than sit on the market for years, is probably one of your great joys in life. These days, with a LOT of competition from foreclosures, it’s even more important to find a good selling price sooner rather than later. Some markets have more than a year’s worth of inventory and not nearly enough buyers to make a dent in it.
The question which needs answering is how bad do they really want to sell their house? Bad enough to price it below what they are convinced it is worth, because that might be their only option. Too many sellers figure they’ll put a high price tag on their property initially, then lower it as time goes on, a strategy that often leads to a buyer’s perception, after a length of time, that the seller is desperate. Expect lowball offers in that case.
Real estate agents should get over themselves enough to realize that their own personal opinion on what the price should be is not the Holy Gospel. Buyers, the local market and the appraiser are the ultimate determiner of the final price. Your mission, should you choose to accept is, is to gently educate the seller as to what the indicators (taken as a whole) suggest the price of their property should be.
Maybe the seller wants to set the price high and is prepared to wait for eternity to get it. That’s fine but often eternity is a difficult concept to comprehend during the first week a house sits on the market. You’ve got to convince them that if there is no legitimate buyer interest in the first 30-45 days, the price needs to be lowered to gain exposure to a fresh pool of buyers. Remember that many people are searching for properties online and the search criteria that can be set operates in levels of $5,000 to $10,000 – for example, homes under $150,000 or $145,000. Adjusting the price to fall beneath one of those parameters can bring in a fresh wave of interest periodically. Let the seller know this isn’t so much a price reduction for the its own sake as a ploy to expose the property to new buyers.
And keep in mind nobody ever said pricing property was easy.
The AIPIS Team
Flickr / jm3