It's Your Turn to Price
Now is your chance to see if you have your finger on the pulse of the market. If you know you don't have your finger on the pulse of the market, no worries, just guess. Click the button to email me your estimated/guesstimated sales price. Whoever is closest, wins! The prize will be a $50 gift certificate to the pizza parlor of your choice. Or coffee. Or ice cream. You get to choose. The winner will be announced when the house closes.
This contest is to try to help my e-newsletter be more interactive.
What Goes Into Pricing?
In this newsletter I usually talk about all that goes into preparing a home for the market -- painting, staging, photographing. But there's more to it. Pricing is another element of the game. It's part math, part design review, and part hunch. It's getting listing agents to tell me what price a house is under contract for before it's public information so I can make use of the most up-to-date comps. I look through listings on line, get out and tour what's on the market, review market trends, and sometimes do high school algebra.
No matter how much I study and research and dig up information, I still can't know exactly what a house will sell for, especially in this overheated market. Sometimes things happen that shouldn't. Sometimes there are naive buyers out there. Sometimes there are two people who MUST have a house and do something stupid because they are desperate. Sometimes a seller needs to sell and the house isn't marketed well. Zillow can spend millions on its algorithm, but they can never really know. On average Zillow estimates prices within a few percentage points but on any individual house, they can be off by more than 25%.
Note: Choosing a list price in this market is different than guessing what it will sell for. You have to pick a price that comparable houses support and that a seller will be okay with if they get just one offer. You also have to find a price that will get enough buyers excited to generate more than one offer. Multiple offers is what drives a price up. You want the buyer to be in a position in which they ask themselves what is the most they will pay for a house. You don't want them to be the only game in town and ask themselves how low a number the seller might take. These are very different numbers.
