Team Pricing Can Help When Sales are Slow
Although existing home sales gained 5 percent in February according to the National Association of Realtors - and reported by MSNBC.com - the slow down in home sales over the past six months may be breeding a new way to price homes when they are listed.
A friend of mine contacted me last week because she may be taking a job out-of-state. Her home is already located in a neighborhood where few houses turn over… it’s not that they don’t sell, it’s that people don’t leave. Because of this, it may be very challenging to come up with a fair market price point to list her home. When I ran my numbers, I can justify listing it for between $180,000 and $280,000 - a price spread too wide to make me at all comfortable. I don’t want her to sell it for too little, but also don’t want to price it so high that she can’t sell.
Clearly I’m going to have to call in the cavalry on this one. I’m putting together a pricing team to go with me to review the property. After we tour the inside of the home and walk the acreage, we’re going to separately crunch our own numbers. Afterward, we’ll sit down at the conference table to defend our potential list price - our final number is the one I’ll share with my seller.
This type of scenario could become more commonplace as it gets harder to find comparable home sales since sales have been down. I’m relieved to have a team of colleagues willing to help me out because certainly I won’t mind stepping in to help them as well.
