Are you thinking about selling right now and you’re curious about where you should be pricing your home? In this video, I’m going to explain how to price your home correctly in today’s market. I’ll help you avoid some common pitfalls and build a strategy to get your home sold fast and for the most amount of money.
Is It Still A Seller’s Market?
Now more than ever, it’s important to price your home correctly. We’re getting a lot of questions on where and how people should price their property. In today’s market, we’ve just gotten out of one of the most extreme real estate markets in history in 2021 and 2022. As a seller, you could ask almost any price and somehow a buyer would find a way to get there.
However, today’s market is different. The good news is it’s still a seller’s market—but it’s not as extreme as it was the last two years. In today’s world, you have to pick a price that’s supported by the market. We’re back to actually looking at comps, seeing what your neighbors and other similar homes sold for. You then have to price your home similarly to the others.
The Importance Of Market Time
Last year, you didn’t have to have any support. If a buyer wanted a house, yours was the only one available—and they paid your price. Today, however, I’m seeing some sellers make the big mistake of having an unsupportive price. They’re then sitting on the market.
Days on market are the enemy of a seller. The longer your house sits on the market, the less it’s going to sell for. I don’t want your house just sitting on the market and waiting for some lowball offer to come in. If you price your house correctly in line with the rest of the market, you will still see multiple offers—and oftentimes even a bidding war, even in today’s market.
The reason pricing right is so important is that there are actually fewer buyers in today’s market than there were last year. Since there are fewer buyers, you do not have as much competition—or buyers competing against each other—as you did last year. For example, if you had 20 showings in a weekend last year, you may only have five showings.
Inventory
That’s why it’s so important to have your house priced correctly. You want to take advantage of a smaller population of buyers. Prices in real estate are controlled by inventory. The more houses are on the market, the lower prices are going to be. The fewer homes that are on the market, the higher prices are going to go.
The good news is we’re still in low inventory conditions—just not as low as we were the last two years. We’re also not seeing any seasonality in the market. The holiday season, for example, is still a great time to sell. Because inventory is lower, we know that buyer demand is a little bit lower, too.
When you see online that inventory has increased, it’s not actually because there are more houses on the market. Rather, it’s because there are fewer buyers. This is probably due to interest rates increasing. All of these reasons are why you need to price your home correctly.
Price Reductions
One of the things that I’ve seen recently is buyers saying that there have been so many price reductions that prices must be coming down. The truth is real estate values have not come down. What has happened is there’s been a lot of sellers in the market who have picked unsupported prices, sat on the market for three to six months, and had no choice but to reduce their price down to where the market is or should be.
This is falsely telling people that prices are coming down when it’s really not the case. We had one homeowner recently price their property for hundreds of thousands more than anybody else. Last year, they probably would have sold. This year, they’re not.
They have a neighbor across the street with the same house that’s asking hundred of thousand dollars less than them. They’re not going to be able to sell without asking the correct price.
Pricing Correctly
If you’re thinking about selling your home now, it’s more important than ever to sell your property for the right price. You need to talk to a real estate agent like myself about the strategies and where you should be pricing your property to make sure you sell for the most amount of money.
Feel free to reach out to me and I’d be happy to help you price your home. If you like the content and videos you’re seeing, please subscribe to my channel so you’re alerted to all things real estate at the Jersey Shore. Stay tuned to see what I feature next!