Whether you choose to market your home yourself or let a professional real estate agent do the work, it is vital that you price your home correctly from the very beginning.
Many sellers (and some agents) are tempted to overprice a home when they first put it on the market. They think they might get lucky and actually get the asking price, even though it is more than the house is worth. Or they think that the house will be more appealing later, when it is advertised as “reduced.” The problem with both of those ideas is that you will lose your first and best potential buyers.
Let’s assume your house is worth $260,000 but you list it at $280,000. You are literally shutting the door on your earliest and best prospects. How? Most buyers will give an agent all of their search criteria—including the most they are willing to spend. The agent will then input that criteria into the MLS system and come up with a complete list of houses in the right price range. But your house won’t be there because you priced it outside the correct range! The buyers who do look at your home will be comparing it to more valuable homes which are correctly priced—your home won’t compare well at all!
Then, after several months, when you realize that your home isn’t attractive to agents or buyers at the inflated price, you will cut the price to what it should have been in the first place. By that time your house is “on the shelf” and that is a red flag to many agents and buyers. Why didn’t the house sell sooner? What was wrong with it? They often think that the buyer must be desperate, so they usually try to force the price even lower than the house is worth.
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