By: David Kucic, Hawaii Home Buying and Selling Team, Tropic Lightning Real Estate
So you want to sell your new listing?
You have probably followed a checklist similar to this:
- Take good pictures of interior and exterior
- Advise your sellers to clean, repair and get rid of clutter
- Make sure there are no foul odors in the home
- Cut, water, trim, edge, prune and weed the landscaping
- Put your sign in the yard along with your flyer box
So now you are ready to roll but before you got this far, you had to talk to your seller and determine the price for the listing. Hopefully you will have savvy sellers that understand the current market and you are able to help them realize their home may not be worth what they think it is. Should you take the listing if it will be overpriced from the start? That depends on how your sellers express their reasoning to you. Maybe they will say that they want to "test the waters" for a few weeks only and then agree to lower their price immediately if there is no action on the property. What if you do take it and you know that it is overpriced?
How are you going to come up with a creative enough justification in your listing remarks for the price that you put on the property when it is clearly overpriced? Well, maybe there are truly some amenities that the home has that none of the other homes in the neighborhood have. Is there an inground swimming pool somewhere in that 3,300 square foot lot that none of the other homes have?
The point of this post is to talk about the TAX ASSESSED VALUE of the property. You know as well as I do that the market in Hawaii has changed drastically over the past 2 years. This is totally throwing off the tax assessments for now until the next assessment is done. The assessed value that is placed on a large number of homes is way above what the home will currently sell for. This doesnt apply to all homes but it sure does apply to a very large number.
When placing a price on your listing, you must think more like an appraiser than the tax assessor. The appraiser is looking at the most recent activity where the assessor has used the information that was current at the time he did his assessment. Pull up the comps. Talk to a fellow realtor. Look at recent sales and look at the current asking prices. Call your favorite lender especially if he or she is willing to help you. Talk to the lender about the implications of overpricing a home only to have the appraisal come in low. Whatever route you choose to use just dont rely on the Tax Assessed Value to determine your price. It is not a good tool to use when basing your sales price.
Visit us on the web for all of your Hawaii Real Estate needs at www.davidkucic.com. Searching for a home to purchase? Enjoy our FREE Hawaii Real Estate MLS search function when you visit.
Comments(20)