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You're getting ready to list your house so the most important factor is the list price.
Here's what the list price is now. It's not what your house is worth. It's not what you
want. What you think you need. What you deserve. It's none of those things. It's about positioning
your house in the marketplace appropriately. And it's about attracting the right pool of
buyers.
You'll always have houses that are better. You'll always have houses that are worse.
You price too high, you get people to jump off to the nicer houses. If someone can go
buy for another 10 or 15 thousand dollars a house that is significantly better because
your price is too high you're just driving people away from your house to the competition.
And the reverse is true. If you price your house right you will pull from the pool of
buyers below you. You will take houses that don't compete as well and those buyers will
go 'why would I buy one of those when I could have yours?' For the right jump off point.
And that's the job of a good listing agent is to help you understand where those price
points are, how far apart you need to be, and how to pull from those different pools
of buyers.
Here's the other thing to understand is pricing again is attracting the right pool of buyers.
I had a listing and we were priced at $220,000. And we were attracting the wrong pool of buyers.
People looking from $210,000 to $230,000 or $240,000. And our house didn't compete great
with the $230,000 $240,000 house so the feedback I was getting was 'too small, location not
good' blah blah blah all kinds of negative stuff. The minute we lowered the price to
a reasonable price to the right pool of buyers, now we were attracting people who were looking
from $180,000 to $210,000 and those people were like, literally the feedback was 'great
house, beautiful kitchen.' The exact same things that people were negative were all
positive. Why? Because the houses that those people are looking at are not so nice in comparison
to what we have to offer.
Here's the last thing and here's a big myth. I'm gonna price it a little high and we're
going to negotiate with someone. The problem is you're negotiating with nobody. If you
don't price it right, all you're doing again is driving people to other houses. Buyers
don't go 'there's the overpriced house. I'll make an offer and see what the seller will
do.' Instead they were driven to other houses and they're gonna go 'that house is overpriced.
Why would I even want to make an offer? Seller's not gonna be reasonable.' They won't feel
compelled to take action on your house. Instead they're going to other houses that are priced
well and are priced reasonable. Those are the ones who are negotiating.
I have a seller in that same situation. We keep getting feedback on a condo saying 'nice
condo but we're going to make an offer on another one. We're going to make an offer
on another one.' In the meantime we're getting no one to negotiate even those my seller's
willing to negotiate. You're much better off dropping the price now, being competitive
and attracting the right pool of buyers.