Pricing Your Home

One of the most important steps is pricing your house properly. To do this you need to look at houses in your area and around your house and try to put yourself in the buyers shoes.  You need to set aside your own love (or hate) for your own house and try to be objective.  Using myself as an example, when I looked at homes around my home, all the houses that were $270k and above were clearly better than mine. Absolutely everything $270k and up had more square footage than I did. The same logic applied to houses priced $230k or below, my home was clearly better than those. Even though a few had my square footage, if they did they had pretty much everything else worse - like they had the square footage but it wasn't finished or was VERY outdated. That left me in the $240k-$260k range for my house.  Then I got even more critical and had to admit that even though my house was very nicely finished, big yard, finished basement, etc. I was among the smallest square footage in that $240k-$260k range. I also couldn't get too close in price to those $270k houses that were all bigger and some just as nice as mine because I figured if my house was in the $260k range, most buyers that could afford it would also be looking at those $270k houses and would probably buy one of those instead of buying my house, and might even be able to write a low offer on one of those other houses and get it for something in the $260k range.  For that reason, I priced my house at $249,900.  This just sort of was the "sweet spot" for houses of similar size and finishing to my own.

When pricing your house, also pay attention to houses that have been on the market for a while and their prices.  Often owners price their homes too high and as a result those houses sit.  Keep in mind that people can price their house for as much as they want, so something that has been sitting on the market for a while might be overpriced, and using it to decide how to price your house can result in your house being overpriced as well.  To get an idea of how long is "too long" for a house to have been sitting on the market, research how long is average for your area.  For example, if the average "days on market" for your area is 100 days and a house has been sitting for 200+ days, there is either something wrong with it or it is overpriced.

A word of warning about Comparative Analysis reports (comps) and recommendations from real estate agents.  Often agents will inflate these and price your house too high in order to win the listing.  I personally did not use any realtor reports to price my home.  I also knew I had no intention of using an agent and I didn't feel like it was fair to ask an agent to do any reports for me.  I have heard both good and bad experiences with using comps prepared by a real estate agent, and neither the good or bad stories vastly outnumber the other so I don't really have a firm opinion about their accuracy.  If you do use a comp report though, please also do your own research. Many county websites offer sales information, and there are also quite a few websites on the internet that will show recent listings and sales in your area.