What You Don't Know About Pricing Your Home That Is The Most Common Mistake Sellers Make

The #1 Most Common Mistake Sellers Make When Pricing A Home For Sale

Don't mis-align your price with your potential buyers

You have probably heard before how important it is to price your home correctly in order to walk away from closing with the most money in your hand. I'll save that whole topic for another post, but let's just agree that list price is about the most important factor in getting your home sold quickly and with the greatest amount of cash. Even the most beautiful house in the most beautiful neighborhood, priced too high, will languish on the market.

Here's what you don't know, that is important to understand when you're strategizing price position: Your house should be on par with other homes in that price range. Of course... simple, right? Now, here is the worst and most common mistake sellers make, even against my professional advice that they pay me big money for: "The buyer is always going to offer me less, so I'll put in a pad of 10-15% to make up for that."  Or, the even worse plan, "let's just put it out there and see what we can get."  Big mistake.

Here's where it goes wrong: If I'm a buyer in the $225-250k range, and I go look at your listing which really should be in the $200-210k range, it's probably not what I'm looking for. And I'm not going to have any useful feedback for you other than, "it's not the one", or "just didn't love it".  There's nothing wrong with your home, but I can do better. I have different expectations. After 3-6 months on the market, the seller is exasperated.  Why has no one even made an offer, even a low one? Because even if the $250k buyer could have your home for $210k, or even $200k (its actual value) they don't want it.  They want a $250k house! And the nice folks who are interested in buying a house for the low $200k's don't even look at your house because it's out of their budget entirely. It's like showing the Cadillac buyer a Chevy Impala, and pricing the Impala too high for likely buyers to even be interested. Showing an overpriced Impala to the Cadillac buyer is a misalignment. Both cars are nice, but there is a different market for the two.

So don't make this common and fatal mistake. You hired a competent realtor, right? Listen to him or her when you're shown the approximate value of your home, and don't misalign your price with your potential buyers. List correctly from Day 1 and enjoy constant showing traffic, even competing offers. And walk away from closing with a respectable sum.

Patrick Gillan, Realtor/Broker  Fort Wayne, Indiana    Patrick@FortWayneListed.com