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Pricing Your Home To Sell

Real estate agents know that a house properly priced is half sold. Set your price too high, and no one comes to lookat it. Set it too low and you have a quick sale... but you short changed yourself.

If you offered your house for sale at $2 million it would never sell (or it would remain on the market until inflation caught up with your price).

If you asked $10 for the house, you’d have a sale before your newspaper ad even published. The supervisor at the newspaper’s classified ad department would be at your door with a check five minutes after you called.

So... you need only to determine the figure, somewhere between $10 and $2 million, which will attract buyers and their agents, and still bring you the most money possible.

Several factors should not influence your asking price:

Your Cost. Suppose you had received the home as a gift. Must you then give it away?

Your Investment In Improvements. You put in that purple kitchen because you enjoyed it, but you are not likely to find anyone who feels your house is worth $15,000 more because of it. Actually they may be instead calculating the cost of tearing it out and replacing it with something in turquoise. On the other hand, you may have converted the 2 car carport to a finished garage at a cost of $1,500 and it may have added $4,000 to the resale value of the property.

Assessed Value. This figure is set by the taxing authorities, but even in areas where a sincere attempt is made to keep it at market value, it’s almost never a dependable guide to what buyers will pay.

Your Needs. You may require $50,000 clear from the sale of your current house to use for the down payment on your next home, but that’s not the buyer’s concern.

Emotion. Watch out that you don’t ask too much for the place because your daughter took her first steps on the porch and your beloved Tabby is buried under the oak tree. On the other hand, don’t let the stress of divorce, or the need to settle an estate quickly, lead you to underprice the property.

So what does count?:

What actually matters is how your home stacks up against the others currently offered for sale (your competition) and those that recently sold in your neighborhood. Buyers will be comparing. Supply and demand in the open market determine your value. Your agent or broker can tell you what buyers are paying for similar property... And that’s what counts.

Hal Schupp, CRS, GRI, Designated Broker for Vail Realty, has been a Tucson, Arizona, Licensed Real Estate Broker since 1987 and has created 100s and 100s of sales of Tucson properties.