Sellers are understandably skittish about listing their homes for sale. Prices are down. Inventory is plentiful. It’s a buyer’s market, no doubt about it. The market always favors someone, however, and just as buyers made purchases with a high degree of confidence and satisfaction during the boom, so too may sellers benefit during this more challenging time. The key is to price your home well, for the market conditions that exist right now.
How will I, as your Realtor, arrive at the price at which I’ll recommend your home be listed? By preparing a comparative market analysis that compares your home to similar homes that recently have sold. To begin, I’ll make note of your home’s primary features: style, number of bedrooms and baths, square footage, lot size, etc. Then I’ll search for comparables–similar homes in your geographic location that have sold within the last 6 months (up to 12 months, if necessary)–and sort through the search results to choose several homes that are most like yours. If there has been a substantial change in average price in the local area of the comparables since the comparable homes sold, adjustments will be made to account for it.
A computer program will average the sale prices of the comparables in order to devise a recommended price for your home. That’s really just a baseline number, however. More adjustments probably need to be made.
The next step is to search comparable homes whose listings expired within the past 6 months without the homes having been sold. I’ll assume they failed to sell because they were priced too high. I’ll also do a search of comparable active listings, which are homes currently on the market. These are the homes yours will compete against.
In order to make a final recommendation, I’ll take the CMA’s computer-generated recommended price and compare it to the expired and active listings’ prices. Your home should be priced lower than the least-expensive expired, for certain, and it should be priced to be competitive with the actives. I’ll give you a range of prices to use as a yardstick and we’ll discuss the benefits and risks of each before you make a final decision.
The upper end will be the absolute maximum I think your home can sell for, if given enough time. Considering that the average total time on market is around 9-10 months, if you choose to price high you should be prepared for your home to stay on the market for a year or more.
The middle price will be the one at which I think your house will sell within an average amount of time (9-10 months). This price will be lower than the expired comparables’ and at the lower end of the actives’ price range.
At the low end will be my recommendation: a price that I believe is 5%-10% below market value.
Disappointing though it may be initially, that low end is where Pocono homes for sale in this market should be priced , as prices may still be falling. By pricing according to current market conditions rather than reacting to conditions after-the-fact, your home is more likely to attract the maximum number of offers and ultimately a better sale price. Lower prices also minimize time on market, which may allow you to take advantage of lower interest rates and lower prices on the home you buy, and also provide possible tax and other expense-of-ownership savings.
