Pricing a Home For Effective Marketing
When placing a home on the market, establishing the right asking price is a key to success in today's changing marketplace. Last year, we experienced the most active seller's market situation in history, with some home receiving multiple offers and selling for more than the asking price. Today, even though the market is still very strong historically, there are many more homes on the market and fewer prospective buyers who are serious about purchasing a home.
Some buyers are holding off a needed home purchase, waiting to see if prices will decline in their local market, and they are indeed dropping slightly nationally. However, mortgage rates are still at historically low levels and other factors point to a continuing strong real estate market.
In this scenario, home sellers need to adjust their strategies to meet today's marketing factors. The primary reason some homes remain on the market for a very long time is that their asking price is too high. When prospective buyers look at available homes on Web sites or offered to them by brokers, they will quickly reject it if the price is obviously too high. They will turn to other more realistically priced homes, and there are plenty of those in today's inventory of available properties. Many home sellers just can't seem to face the fact that their home might not bring the price it could have a year ago. At least the value has not gone up at a double-digit rate as has been the case in the recent past.
When a home is over-priced when it's first placed on the market, it can be stigmatized as an over-priced property in the minds of active buyers and brokers. This can be a marketing problem even after reducing the price. It's better to be realistic in the initial pricing of the home