Price Your House To Sell: If you want your house to sell for top dollar, that doesn’t always mean using a super-aggressive pricing strategy. Real estate experts agree that the single most important consideration for selling your house is pricing it right.
Besides having to be aligned with the prices of similar homes in the area, the sale price you’re asking for shouldn’t be too high or too low. You should price your house strategically for online searches, and it needs to be set with psychology in mind.
Many factors go into determining the right price at which to list a home for sale. So here are our tips (some with a bit different take on pricing) on how to price your house to sell in Lake Forest Park, WA.
1. Stand in the Buyer’s Shoes
Think about the situation from the buyer’s perspective.
It’s often difficult to do, but to price your house to sell in Lake Forest Park, you simply have to be objective and set aside your emotional attachment to your home. What it’s really worth, has nothing to do with how much you THINK it’s worth. The true value is based on with the buyers think it’s worth… and that is derived by their emotional attachment, as well as the cost of other homes in the area.
Your real estate agent will help you determine the property’s value by looking at what similar homes in the area have sold for, and comparing that to the size and condition of your home to come up with a reasonable listing price. There’s a lot of math involved, and not very much room for sentimentality.
2. Be Original: Price Outside the Band
Most of the time, prices for comparable homes in an area will tend to bunch up or “band.” For example, homes like yours may all be priced between $184,000 and $187,000. You could, then, price your house to sell at $189,000 because that price is open will make your house stand out from the crowd.
3. Learn From Others’ Mistakes: Don’t Over-Price
Before settling on a sale price, take a look at houses that have recently NOT sold in your immediate area. Why are they sitting on the market so long? How does the price and condition of these homes compare to others in the area? Has the price been dropped over time? What is going on here? Overpricing is the Number One reason homes for sale don’t sell quickly.
Your agent may also be able to share additional private information from the MLS showing homes that have had major price drops before selling. The idea here is to learn from these pricing mistakes and then avoid them.
4. Avoid Century Pricing: Round It Down
This is a tip to help you price your house to sell in Lake Forest Park that draws on a well-established pricing tactic, one you see in retail stores all the time. It’s simple and it works – don’t price in zeroes (centuries). When you go to the grocery store or to that big discount store, you never see items priced at $5 or $10. Nope, those items will be $4.99 or $9.95. Even though there’s only a difference of a penny or so, the items seem to be much cheaper. And sometimes the psychology of perception is everything. So you wouldn’t, for example, price your house at $200,000. You would, instead, price it at $199,999 or $198,599.
5. Price for Online Searches: Know the Cut-Offs
Many people today begin their house hunting online, so your pricing has to take that fact into account as well. Your pricing strategy, then, should reflect the search parameters, especially the price range, that online house hunters use. Most people will search online within a price range from lowest to highest acceptable prices like $175,000 to $200,000. And if you set your price outside that range, say, at $170,000 or $205,000, those searchers will never see your listing. Of course, they will be seen by people seaching in separate categories (like $200,000 – $225,000), so you will have to decide what range your home is most likely to SELL in.
Pricing the property too low creates the same problem in this case, but $199,999 would fall within the search range and still be within a dollar of the maximum.
6. Better Too Low Than Too High, Here’s Why
I find in general that pricing a house in Lake Forest Park on the low side will attract a lot of attention from buyers. It will be the shiny penny with a lot of “wow-factor” for everybody searching within that price range. This will help it sell quickly and with fewer costly concessions (you’ll be able to get away with paying less for closing costs and repairs, for example, because the buyer knows he’s getting a good deal on the original price). In many cases, the housing market here in Lake Forest Park, WA is strong enough to attract multple buyers on a well-priced home and this will drive up the price higher.
I recently sold an investment property for 10% more than it was listed for and three of the top offers were within $5,000 of each other. That’s when you know “the market has spoken” and helped you get full market value for your property.
6. Do Your Own CMA
And just as a real estate broker would, if you are selling your house yourself you should perform a comparative market analysis on our own property.
Although you won’t have access to all the tools an agent would, you can still get a good idea of the market value of your home. Just be sure to look at homes with square footage and amenities close to what yours has, about the same age, listed within the past three months, and no farther away than about half a mile. If you would like help with this, I am happy to assist you as a courtesy, just contact my office.
There’s a lot you can do on your own to price your house to sell in Lake Forest Park, WA. But using a qualified local real estate professional will usually mean better and faster results. A local agent can help with optimum pricing because she’ll likely know about sales in the area/neighborhood that is in progress, but not yet on public record. Click here to understand the differences (chart) between selling with a real estate broker like me, and selling the property yourself (FSBO).