pricing: "Designed to Sell": It Only Works When The Price Is Right
- 06/20/09 03:29 PM
If you've ever seen "Designed to Sell", the HGTV hit, there's a moment at the end when, after the first Open House, the sellers are gleefully picking through multiple offers - or they are saying that they are going to hold out for the right one.
Today, I showed a house where the sellers were hold outs.
Now, I wasn't blown away by the staging in this house to begin with. And I was stunned when the seller told me that HGTV had done the living room, dining room and master bedroom. It was just OK. Lots of browns and tans … (34 comments)
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pricing: Does It Make (Dollars and) Cents To Renovate?
- 09/25/08 03:55 PM
Last week, I previewed a house on the brokers' tour that I thought was really, really overpriced. It was a largish brick center-hall colonial that was a sort of Washington, DC cliche house, resembling the one in the photo. And it was what I call a "granny house". The kitchen was state of the art for about 1958. And the bathrooms were the originals, although they must have been a builder's upgrade. The fixtures and tiles were great shades of pink, turquoise and purple.
Yesterday on tour, I ran into a buddy (in another overpriced house) who was talking about how … (24 comments)
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pricing: Why Hasn't My House Sold? It's Not Always The Price!x=
- 03/31/08 01:48 AM
A few years ago, I was approached to be the third agent for a stately colonial on upper 16th Street. The first two agents had the distinction of being the guys who ranked number 1 and 2 in dollar volume in DC. I'm nowhere close.
I reviewed the prior listing information. The price didn't look bad. Neither agent had made the place particularly easy to show - I hadn't been inside during either listing period. Then, when I got inside, I quickly figured it out.
The owners had been in the Foreign Service for decades and had lived and worked all … (22 comments)
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pricing: An Interesting Numbers Game
- 02/16/08 04:15 AM
In this market, our biggest challenge seems to be pricing our listings right on the bulls eye. But how to do that is sometimes pretty tricky.
Today's Washington Post carried an article about an interesting approach to pricing, so looking for any help I can get, I read every word of it.
Writer, Sandy Fleishman, cited a study by Cornell University showing that houses with prices ending in "000" tend to sell for less than homes with a more precise number. If, for example, you set your number at $649,000, your home could be expected to sell for less that a … (13 comments)
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pricing: My Little Zillow Meltdown
- 01/15/08 01:55 AM
Since I actually met the Zillow folks at BloggersConnect last week, I'm almost tempted to take down the couple of rants I've done in a couple of blog posts, but as I learned, "Once on the Internet, always on the Internet".
Here in Washington, there are special challenges for any company trying to get an on-line home values database. Neighborhoods are architecturally diverse, so comparing a subject house to it's "comps" isn't even apples to oranges. It's apples to monkeys! Even in a block of identical looking row houses, some are granny houses that were state-of-the-art in 1942, and others have … (67 comments)
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pricing: The WOW House In A Plain Brown Wrapper
- 01/03/08 01:26 PM
On Monday, favorite clients called and asked if we could get in to see one of the few houses we'd not yet seen that are in their target neighborhood and price range.
Why hadn't we gone in? Probably it was the main MRIS photos, which showed a quite plain Jane facade on a house above a million dollars.
I did a drive by that confirmed the modest street presence. This house had a face that only an owner could love. The virtual tour, which we had looked at, made the interior look attractive, but I thought it was just a great … (16 comments)
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pricing: Does The "Celebrity" Factor Help Sell A House?
- 12/08/07 02:04 PM
Early in my career, I listed a house that belonged to Ralph Nader's chief litigator. A young couple came to the Open House and recognized a photo of Alan Morrison and his wife, Anne. They asked if the photo was the Alan Morrison, I said yes, and they said, "We have to have this house!" Alan was their hero. They put in a full price offer, and this was back in the days when that didn't happen very often.
Now I never thought of the Morrison's house as having celebrity value, but to this young two-lawyer couple, it did.
So … (12 comments)
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pricing: The Thrill of the Chase
- 08/28/07 04:58 PM
The other day, a favorite colleague asked me to help her price a house. She would be competing against two other top agents. She was psyched!
So we drove over to the house in a less than chic DC neighborhood. The seller had purchased it two years ago, and was a fixxer upper. It needed a whole lot of fix.
When we got there, I noted beautiful landscaping, but peeling paint on the trim. Inside, there was peeling paint, a funky kitchen, bathrooms that looked like instant athlete's foot, a 50 amp breaker box, and the list could go on … (6 comments)
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pricing: Is "Staging" Going Too Far?
- 06/24/07 12:10 PM
Years ago, I listed a house that showed extremely well. The owners were anal retentive neat freaks taken to a whole new level. I mean, you could eat off the floor of the boiler room in the basement. You could eat off the floor of the firebox in the wood-burning fireplace! It had been on the market for over a year, and I was their third agent. And even I couldn’t get it sold after a hefty price reduction.
When a friend gave me a visit to a great astrologer for my birthday, the wise old seer said, “I see a very … (9 comments)
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If you've ever seen "Designed to Sell", the HGTV hit, there's a moment at the end when, after the first Open House, the sellers are gleefully picking through multiple offers - or they are saying that they are going to hold out for the right one. 
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