You have likely heard more times than you’d like to recall that the three most important considerations for selling a home are location, location, and location. There’s much truth in that, but it turns out that buyers look at price first. No matter how perfectly a house meets a buyer’s needs and wants, if it’s priced outside her budget, then it’s a no-go. That’s how important pricing is. To help you out, then, here are 5 insider tips for pricing your home in Columbia.
1. Resist the Temptation to Overprice
The first thought many sellers have is to set the price higher than they’re actually willing to settle for, reasoning that they can always reduce the price if the higher figure doesn’t pan out. But that’s a mistake, and you need to resist the temptation to overprice when pricing your home in Columbia.
Maybe the most critical aspect of getting a good price for a home is time on the market. Most of a home’s showings occur during the first 20 to 30 days on the market. After that, views drop off significantly, and it gets far more difficult to sell the home.
Overpricing with the intention of decreasing the price if time on the market increases usually backfires. Often, sellers don’t realize the price is far too high until it’s too late – after that window of opportunity has passed and buyers begin to think something is wrong with the home because it’s been on the market for so long.
Contact your Columbia agent to learn how to avoid pricing too high. Just call 803-792-SELL to discover more.
2. Price for Online Searches
Today, pricing your home in Columbia means pricing for online searches.
Most home searches are now conducted in part if not sometimes entirely online. And when buyers search for homes online, they set the price search parameters for a certain range, say, $149,000 to $199,000. So if you price your home at $150,000, you’ll miss out on a big percentage of potential buyers because your home is just out of the range and won’t show up in their searches.
Again, contact your Columbia agent at 803-792-SELL to discover more about pricing your home to appear in more search results.
3. Don’t Use Weird or “Creative” Prices
Pricing your home to sell also means not using any weird or “creative” prices.
“Sometimes, sellers want to get creative with their asking price. A seller whose home was valued between $750K and $800K wants to ask $787,777. . . . Suchan oddly specific figure calls attention to itself for no good reason, like a house painted purple. Buyers will often wonder why the seller chose that figure. From there, they get curious about who the seller is, and so on.”
Your goal should be to showcase the home – not the price or yourself. As with preparing the home for sale, you want to remove any items that mark it specifically as your home. It’s best to keep yourself and your pricing in the background as much as possible to appeal to the widest possible audience.
4. Run the Comps and Look at Active Listings
Certainly, one of the first and most important things you should do for pricing your home in Columbia is to have your agent run the comps, that is, perform a comparative market analysis. This will allow you to know what very similar homes in the neighborhood have sold for in the recent past. You can determine fair market value this way and then price accordingly.
But don’t stop there . . .
Take a close look at comparable homes in the neighborhood that are currently for sale. Taking into account these active listings will give you a good idea of what the competition is up to price-wise, and you’ll know exactly what you’re up against when it comes to pricing.
5. Price With Trends in Mind
It’s also a good idea (though it can be difficult to pull off) to price ahead of the curve, pricing your home with an eye to obvious price trends in the immediate area.
Suppose, for example, that “prices are decreasing in your local market. You set the price of your house at today’s fair value. But two months down the line, when you’re dealing with make-it-or-break-it interest, your house is overpriced. You’re behind the curve. At that point, if you cut the price to market value, you’ll be behind the curve again as prices erode beneath you. And cutting the asking price is a signal of desperation that makes buyers wonder what’s wrong with the house.”
Of course, prices could be increasing, And in that case, if you don’t price ahead of the curve, you could be losing money when your home sells in a month or two. Be sure to consult your agent on the best way to proceed here.
Pricing your home right has been called the most effective marketing tool, and it may be. So don’t lose out by trying to do it all on your own. Only a local Columbia agent will know the local market well enough to get the pricing exactly right. When it’s time for pricing your home in Columbia, contact us today at 803-792-SELL.