5. Days on Market

Ask me to send you figures – overpriced homes will sit on the market. When this happens, and an interested buyer sees this, they ask a series of questions:

- Why didn’t anyone want THIS home?

- Are there issues with the home that someone discovered?

- The price must be high or it would have sold – let’s low-ball!

6. Lower Proceeds from the sale

When a property starts life as an overpriced listing, it generally sells fro less than market value. So not only have you arrived back where you would have started, you have shelled out all kinds of payments, lost nights of sleep and gone through the various carrying costs to maintain the property. get it priced right out of the gate!

4. Target the Buyer Agents!

Buyer Agents are our VIPs! When they have a buyer, most often they have 20 properties (at least) that fall into the search criterion of the buyer. Generally, if they do their homework and preview homes, they are showing a dozen or so homes to the buyer. So now we have 20 homes where 8 need to be eliminated. These will be the overpriced homes, those with more difficult showing data – ’24 hours notice’, etc, and those that don’t ‘pop’ on the marketing materials. Don’t let your home fall in the latter category, especially when you can control these issues. These are your levers in your sale. You cannot address your location, or possibly other issues, however you can market-price your home and make sure it shows easily.

5. Getting the Loan

It gives many agents an ethical problem listing your home above market value. Even if they should list it high, and if you happen to find a buyer, chances are that the buyer will be funding part or all of the purchase with a loan, especially in these times of historic low interest rates. Your property will need an appraisal based on comparable sales – similar ones to the sales you and your agent have discussed. If it does not appraise, they will not get the loan. You will generally find this out 2 or 3 weeks after we all get excited about the contract – now we are back to the drawing board. Get it priced right out of the gates!

1. Timing is everything

Your thought process may be to put it on the market as high as you can, and then you can always bring it down later, right? This issue with this approach is that the most ‘buzz’ is often created in the first 30 days a home is on the market. By pricing it high, not only are you bypassing your best candidates for buyers, you are also telling the buyer agents that accompany them that your home is a ‘hard sell’ for them. The buyer agents are your ‘multipliers’ – you want them to bring the current buyers, and new ones they work with, back to your home. If it seems like a hard sell in this ‘buyers’ market’, they will use their time and energy showing the 11 other value-priced properties that are out there today.

If you would like to check the value of your Asheville area home, check it out here.

2. You are helping your competition sell!

Your overpriced property is helping your competitors sell theirs. In this market, it’s a good strategy to be in the top 10% of value. When buyers are looking at a dozen homes and choosing, your overpriced property helps the others appear to be in this 10%