Tips to accurately price your home

7 Awesome Tips To Accurately Price Your Home

There are so many ways that you can get the pricing wrong when you are getting ready to list you home. Here are some tips that will help you to accurately price your home the first time so you can sell quickly. Many sellers have already made up their mind on what they want for their house long before they ever decide to list it because they have checked Zillow, gotten an appraisal, or think they have a handle on the market. The problem is that only a small percentage of those sellers will be able to successfully sell their home at that price. Real estate when priced incorrectly will sit on the market until a price reduction is made however, once a house sits on the market buyers already believe that there is something wrong with it.

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Tip#1 Don't Use Zillow To Price Your Home

Poor Zillow gets a lot of grief and the reality is that they are a great tool for people to use when they are looking for a home to rent or buy or looking to rent a home that they own. However, when you are listing your home Zillow is notorious for being inaccurate. The problem is that Zillow will look at bedrooms, baths, square footage, and lot size and come up with a price. Home values are rarely determined by those criteria. Your home could be ocean, creek, or riverfront and be worth more because of that and Zillow won't take that into account. There are countless other special circumstances that Zillow fails to consider when pricing a home. Bill Gassett  outlines this in a fantastic way in his article Ways Sellers Get Their Pricing Wrong

Tip#2 Don't Overprice Your Home

Real estate is like bread. If you leave bread sitting out for too long it gets stale. Well, real estate is no different, if your home is listed at a price that is obviously overpriced then you run the risk of no one wanting to buy it. Your home will sit there on the market in all of its glory getting stale! Now if you take it off of the market and you reduce the price and relist it then buyers recognize it and it's still stale. No one wants the bread that you left out on the counter for days until it got stale and then stuck in the fridge for an hour! The key is to not overprice your home to begin with and therefore have a better chance of selling. If you do overprice your home, then it is not necessarily a death sentence...if you have the right agent they should be able to sell it at the lowered price. Check out Ferris Property Group's article The 7 Deadly Home Seller Sins to get more insight into common home selling mistakes.

Tip#3 Don't List With The Agent Who Tells You They Will List At The Highest PriceReal-Estate-Pricing-Mistakes-to-Avoid

This is the game in the real estate world. You will go to an agent and say you want a certain amount for your home. If they tell you that it is not plausible then you will get irritated and go to another agent and so on and so forth. Something to consider...the more your home sells for is the more commission that your agent will get. Why would they try to sell your home for less then they thought you could get for it??? That is crazy!!!! There are some agents out there that will tell you that they can sell your home at an inflated price just to get the listing and then when they get the listing they spring for a price reduction right away because they know that the home will never sell at that price! Kyle Hiscock has written a great article called Real Estate Pricing Mistakes that will help you understand why it's important to accurately price your home.

Tip#4 Review Active Homes, Sold Homes, and Pending Homes That Are Similar To Yours

Oooooh if the Price is Right then what is the right way to price it??? Lynn Pineda wrote an awesome blog on that old game show The Price Is Right and how it pertains to accurately pricing a home. To begin you are going to want to take a look at what homes that are similar to yours are listed in your area (town, subdivision, county, etc.) and what they are listed for. This will help you in accurately pricing your home because it will help you to see what the average price for your home is. Then take a look at what has sold recently in your area that is similar to your home and also homes that are in contract with the same criteria. This will give you a feel for the market and help you to accurately price your home.

Hire an Agent You Can Trust


Tip#5 Ask For Help From An Agent

So many sellers think that they can save themselves the money to pay a real estate agent if they just list their own home. This is NEVER a good idea. The reason is that you are not licensed to sell real estate so there is a lot about selling a home that you don't know. A good example is disclosures...do you know which disclosures are required by your state/county/city? How about the ones that are not required but are good to have to cover you against any liability for common issues? Most sellers cannot accurately price their own home, nor can they follow through with the transaction if they do get an offer because they don't know what is involved in the transaction. Anita Clark wrote an article called Selling Your Home For Top Dollar in which she states that "It is dangerous to go alone: Use a realtor!"

Tip#6 Find Out How Value Is Determined By Professionals

Asking for help does not make you weak, it makes you smart! Ask everyone you know what they think they would pay for your home; ask real estate agents what they think it's worth and finally choose an agent based on how honest you think that they are. You need to trust your agent to help you to accurately price your home. take a look at some of the advice professional real estate agents from all over the USA have to say about correctly pricing your home by reading Joe Manausa's  article How a Realtor Determines Real Estate Market Value.

Tip#7 Selling Land Is It's Own Animal...Price It Wisely

Selling land is totally different than selling a house. It has a unique set of circumstances and must be treated differently in pricing and in the rest of the transaction. DW Slater Co. does a fantastic job of breaking down how to accurately price land in their article Let's Talk Some Dirt- A Look at Land Values in Real Estate.