Listing your home? A different way to look at home preparation and pricing…

If you’re looking to sell your home then there must be a very good reason for your doing so. Whether it be needing more space, financial problems, being transferred to another city, whatever, I take your needs very seriously. Because of that, I can’t stress enough how important correct pricing and staging are.

Whether you’ve sold a home in the past or are thinking about selling your home in the future, I suggest that we look at it, not from a seller’s (you) perspective but from a buyer’s.

Let’s say that you are in the market to buy a used car…you know that you want a midsized family car (specifically a Honda Accord), used but not old, open to colors, etc. You hop online or go down to the dealership and discover that there are many to choose from so WHICH ONE will you choose?

Does it:

• have scratches or a beautiful paint job?
• cloth or vinyl interior?
• new tires or original?
• moon roof?
• 2.4L or 3.0L ?
• does it smell like smoke?
• how is the condition of the interior?

Those are all things that you’d likely consider, right? You’ve also noticed now that the vast majority of these cars retail for around 18-19K so by now, your clear expectations are that you’re going to be able to purchase a car for around the 18K range. What would you think if you noticed this one car on the lot, that’s just like the others, but priced at 23K? Chances are, you wouldn’t even bother looking in the window, would you?

Now, if you’re the seller of one of these cars, wouldn’t you want to give it a good washing, buff out any scratches, get some air freshener in there, remove any trash, detail the interior, etc? And if the car you were selling had cloth interior and a smaller engine than some of the others, wouldn’t you feel the need to price it a little lower?…so that it can actually compete with the others?

When prospective home buyers are searching for homes, they have a very similar mindset. And they don’t care how many cookouts you’ve had on your deck, birthday parties for the kids, snuggling by the fireplace, etc. They are SHOPPING and if you want to sell your home, you need to make it appeal (condition and price) to those buyers because if you don’t, they’ll go right around the corner and buy the next one.

Besides neutralizing your home, giving it a great cleaning, de-cluttering, taking down the abundance of personal photos, staging it, and creating good curb appeal, you HAVE to price it along with the competition.

Some problems with pricing your home too high:

• Potential buyers may look at the lower priced competition first and only come back to yours if the others don’t work out.
• You’ll miss out on the most crucial part of a listing which would be the first 2-3 weeks.
• Your home is no longer the hot, new listing anymore and it “sits”. As it sits people either start to wonder what’s wrong with it or assume that you are an unreasonable seller.
• and please make note….EVEN IF someone falls in love with your particular home and offers you full price, your home will still need to “appraise”. If your sales price is 200K but every other similar home in the area has been selling for 170K, then the appraised value will most likely be about 170K. If that buyer will be getting a mortgage, the lender will only be willing to lend a max of 170K. Who’s going to come up with the $30,000 shortfall? Either the buyer will have to come up with another $30K to put down or you will have to drop your price by $30K. Otherwise, the deal will fall apart and your home has just been off the market for the past 4+ weeks and you’re back to square one.

In summary, if you really want to sell your home, you really need to price it realistically and do everything in your power to make sure it shows better than everything else out there. Always consult a Realtor.

Tags: selling