We recently sold our house, and as always, we learned a few new things about the home selling process {even though we’ve done it a time or two before}. It’s still pretty fresh on my mind, so I figured with the real estate market still hot in many places across the US, now might be an ideal time to sell for you and maybe I could use that knowledge to help a few of you potential sellers out.
Or you can bookmark this page and refer back to it if you decide to sell in the future. I’ve been told it’s a seller market right now, but given how quickly that changes, you could read this tomorrow and it would be a buyer’s market! Either way, here are a few tricks I’ve learned to help you price your home to sell:
Have a plan. Before you list, regardless of whether you sell your house on your own or hire a realtor, sit down and talk out pricing. Know what you are willing to take as a bottom line, and be honest about what you want or need to get out of the house. Just because you list your house for $399K because that’s how much you want for it, that doesn’t mean you are going to get that price. Know that typically what you list at is not what you’ll be offered.
Know your stuff. If you are selling your house, research is your best friend. Pull tons of comparable houses in your area that have recently sold, are pending or are on the market. Compare all of their similarities and differences. See how much they are selling for, or how much they have sold for and how long they were on the market. This will give you a great idea of what to expect.
Price it right. Be honest with yourself about the worth of your house. You might be wildly attached to your house and feel like it is worth much more than all of the comparable houses, because it’s where you raised your babies, or it’s your first home, or where you’ve watched your family grow.
Or maybe you are hoping to get money back for all of the sweat labor you put in to renovate it. Those things don’t matter when pricing your house. The only thing that matters to potential buyers is that it is priced fairly for the square footage, neighborhood, and finishes. You have to take some of the emotion out of it. If you overprice your house, it simply won’t sell.
Try the 999 trick. If you want to ask $500k for your house, price it at $499K instead. Seeing the 4 instead of the 5 could make all of the difference. It’s a weird mental thing us humans are wired for.
Price it low. I know that seems like an odd strategy up front, but hear me out. If the market is loaded with comparable homes, price yours just a bit lower {but still within the price you’re comfortable taking}. Seeing a similar house at a lower price should peak the interest of more buyers and could potentially cause a multiple offer situation.
Hire a professional. I’m all for trying to fix my dryer using a DIY tutorial on YouTube, but when it could mean the difference between my overpriced house sitting on the market for 6 months, or a house priced right selling in days, I’ll hire a professional. Do your homework here, too and find a trusted one with a lot of experience. They’ll do all of the comp legwork, and historically will get you more for your home than if you sold it yourself.
Listen to your agent, but do your homework. When your agent, who should come to you with a wealth of home comps, suggests you start at a certain price or that you lower the asking price if it’s not moving, be open to that. If you’ve hired a trusted realtor, remember to trust them! But also be familiar with the market so you can tell if they’re trying to encourage the sale of your home at a lower price to pocket a paycheck or help their time-on-market stats!
Any tried and true advice on how to price your home? Share it below.
Have a great day,
~Mavis
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Charla says
I always do my own research. My realtor wanted to price my last house $20k less. I said no. Sold the house in three days with multiple offers over asking at my price. This was 6years ago.
My big tip:
Pack up everything extra. I mean everything. My closets were cleared out. Cabinets only had daily use items and I staged the house. Dishes set on tables, every light on, clean clean clean!
Mavis Butterfield says
Great tips Charla.
Katie says
I definitely agree with clearing it out, especially if you have kids! Less to clean up when you have to suddenly show in an hour. When selling our last house we got a small storage unit and packed up as much stuff as we could manage to live without. And since that first big clearing out was done, it was easy to pack everything up when we did finally move.
Christine says
The last couple homes we sold we had them appraised and inspected before listing them. Having an inspection can save you a lot of money in repairs. Many times the inspector will tell you how to go about fixing problems and you can ask them all sorts of questions and receive reccomendattions from them. Often times the buyer will require the repairs be made by a licensed professional which may not be needed if it is something simple. The more information you have, the more control you have.
Brianna says
When we lived in GA a few years ago our next door neighbor was prepping to sell her house, in a flooded market with nearly identical houses. She told me she hired a jack of all trades to come in and fix all of the little things that were bugging her or she never got around to doing. Just putting fresh white paint on the porch columns and shutters and mailbox made a huge difference. The guy was there 3 day doing her honey-do list. Her house sold within a few weeks on the market compared to all of the nearly identical homes priced a bit lower and sitting on the market. I have never sold a house, but apparently ‘freshening’ it up and fixing all the small details that bugged you makes a difference.
Jill says
Is this the new house? The old house? A random house? Inquiring minds…
Deanna L Allen says
When you get ready to take photos PLEASE have the rooms as open and empty as possible. I have looked at thousands of home listing and it would stun you the number of photos that have over flowing garbage cans , cluttered counter tops (garbage, dishes, and the like) Invest in a set of matching towels for the bath rooms keeping neutral color or light matching color And posts TONS of pictures in a progression through the house so people will “see” what it looks like. Include ALL rooms, out buildings, street view.
Elle says
Definitely know your market. My area of the NorthWest? Bidding wars on every price except over 1.5 million!!!! Homes under 10yo are selling in hours after the bidding war and well above asking. The values are rising several % every month. Thank goodness we have a 1 year freeze on property taxes in my county thanks to Covid-the one good thing.
It’s good of you to share/educate!
Virginia says
This is a very timely subject for me. We decided to offload an unneeded second home recently and received a full price offer within 24 hours of our home going on MLS, and another offer within 48 hours from out of state. Our asking price was MUCH more than we could have gotten for the house even one to two years ago. I believe we could have gotten even more had we been willing to wait another week to drum up additional interest, but we decided to accept the first offer because the buyers asked us for absolutely nothing and we can wrap things up within a month. Our net will pay off 2 real estate loans, we’ll be debt free, and we’ll still be left with a very nice chunk of change in the bank. I cannot tell you how excited and relieved I am to be done with mortgage debt. I love my small-ish home and I’m never moving again. Simple living is the best! And now I’ll get to research all of Mavis’s gardening advice because I’m going to plant my very first vegetable garden next year! Wahoo!!
Mavis Butterfield says
Wahoooo Virginia! Well done. 🙂
Virginia says
Thanks, Mavis. You’re goal-oriented way of living is an inspiration! I don’t think I’m too much older than you, and I sure wish I had your energy level. But,eh, we all have our burdens. 😉
Linda Sand says
When your realtor says paint your front door–do it! Ours suggested we hire a stager, which we did, and accepted all but one of her recommendations–I simply Could Not live with those pillowcases even to increase the odds of selling. 🙂
Ramona says
Include pictures of garage, out buildings and perhaps size of them. That is one of the first things my husband looks at. We put our house on the market in May and got 2 offers that first day. We had one realtor 9 months earlier tell us what she thought it would sell for. Then when we did put it on the market with a different realtor his price was $60 thousand more. We didn’t think it would sell at that price and like I said 2 offers that day. This was in Idaho. I am wondering since people seem to be leaving the city I would be curious who is buying the high priced places in the cities. I do know Seattle area market is still HOT. We were trying to move back there and yes bidding wars and sold houses without even people seeing them in person.
Katherine says
A couple of weeks ago we closed on a home closer to the grandkids. We had looked in the area for several months and houses were going under contract within hours listing and getting multiple offers. We finally found a home by accident (we took a wrong turn) as the agent was setting up the for sale sign in the yard. The sellers agent showed us the home while we waited for our agent to arrive. We told her to expect an offer the next morning. The seller ended up receiving multiple offers but took ours because we didn’t need to wait and sell a home and were able to close on a date she wanted. It’s a red hot market in Georgia right now.
Lori King says
Stage your house if you want the most money. Clear out the clutter! Make the rooms sparse but homey. You can temporarily get a storage unit. Pictures! Professional pictures make a huge difference. Video as well. The Realtors we have used hire someone to do this as part of their service. A couple realtors have brought in a professional stager to give advice as well. Make sure the first picture on Realtor.com, trulia or zillow etc is your best picture – this is created by your realtor but always double check your listing.
JoAnn Young says
I am a Realtor on the east coast of Central Florida and much of what everyone has said is correct. I listed my own house but I had a younger, millennial Realtor come to my house when I placed it on the market last year. She gave me several tips because that is the group that is currently buying more homes now. Most in this age group like the simple, no clutter homes. They are minimalists, not hoarders (like we collectors) 🙂 I took her tips to heart even though the things I thought would sell the house were not ideal to the current market of buyers. With a few tweaks, we sold our home that week and for 5K more than asking price – which was already top of the market. I would say, if you know you are going to move, start now by fixing small things that need repair, painting, and checking landscape for curb appeal and start getting rid of things you know you are not going to keep. We took the whole year before working on small fix-it projects on the weekends. My young Realtor friend suggested I take down all my lace curtains, doilies, tablecloths, remove furniture from rooms and I left only one piece of wall art hanging in each room. I had no knick knacks out and my kitchen counters were almost bare. I was packing anyway and these items needed to be removed to make the rooms look larger and less of “me” in them. The house showed like a model home. Yes, I thought her ideas were extreme but I believe it is what sold the house.
Your market is very important to pricing a house. One must know the market’s inventory, how many days it is taking to sell a home in your own neighborhood and for what reasons a home would not sell or sell quickly in a hot market. Pricing a home is a science.
Good Luck!
Naomi says
Before we sold our house in Phoenix 4 years ago we had a PODS storage container delivered to our house. We cleaned out closets, cabinets, and rooms with extra furniture and loaded it all up on the PODS container that was sent to a climate controlled building. Without the extra furniture and clutter, this really opened up the house. The house had already been painted and a new tile roof replaced. My husband is very handy, so he fixed all the little things that we could find that needed repair. I cleaned the house until it was spotless. The biggest suggestion is to make sure that the realtor has a really good photographer to take pictures of your home inside and out. The photos he took really made our house look great! Our realtor increased the asking price so that we would have some negotiating room. The house was listed on MLS early that Monday morning. The realtor had a showing at Noon that same day and a full price offer was put on the house at 3PM. All that hard work paid off.