Let Me Help You Choose the Right Sales Price
A Property's Listed Price vs. Actual Sales Price...
The first thing to understand is a home's list price and its eventual sales price are often two different prices. The first price to pick is the your targeted sales price. But that will probably not be identical to your list price. If you choose your targeted price carefully, you can use market conditions to figure out how to choose the most effective list price.Understand How People SEARCH for Properties...
People, by nature, seem to remember the price of a home when a home comes on the market, but they might not know the price of the home when it sells. You can go to websites such as Zillow, Realtor, or Trulia.com to find out the sold prices or ask an agent to provide them to you. But only prices within the past 3 months should be used, if at all possible. (As a side note, your Realtor has access to more accurate data that you will find on these public sites because the actual area MLS services are updated more frequently.)Just because a home down the street sold for $600,000 doesn't mean that your home will sell for $600,000, even if you think your home is identical to that home. I've heard sellers claim that a bigger lot size means they can get a lot more for their home, and maybe they can -- just not as much as they may think. Appraisers, for example, might allocate only an additional $10,000 for a lot 1/3 bigger than yours.
If your home has 4 bedrooms and the comparable has 3 bedrooms, your 4th bedroom might be worth only an additional $5,000. Not the $50,000 you might hope. A 4 bedroom home is often more desirable than a 3 bedroom because buyers who absolutely need a 4th bedroom will not buy a 3 bedroom property.
