If you have to sell a home, I have an important tip that is crucial for you to understand. The internet has created many changes and opportunities in the real estate market, and home sellers who do not understand the evolution in pricing strategy will find that they are chasing away homebuyers.
One big questions that home sellers always want to ask is how much “negotiating room” should they include in their asking price for a home. I’m sure Google has seen the following more than once!
To Sell A Home – Think About How To Buy A Home
The easiest way to understand the answer to this question is to take a look at the housing market from the vantage of the consumer (the homebuyer). If you study the way a buyer goes about the process of buying a home, then you will be able to understand the smartest techniques that you should use to sell a home.
Before Computers – In the “old days,” buyers would start the home buying process by talking to a REALTOR® about selection and availability. You see, REALTORS® were the “gatekeepers” of the information about homes for sale in the market. There was no internet, no great consumer MLS search tool, so homebuyers had to talk to a real estate professional to find out about all the properties for sale in the market.
Before the use of computers, each office had its own “book of business.” If somebody wanted to sell a home, they would list is with a real estate broker that they felt would get it exposed to the most buyers possible. The broker would advertise in newspapers and magazines, and would put a sign in the yard and hold open houses.
Pricing a home before computers required a lot of experience, as the real estate company had sketchy records of what homes had sold for in the past. The better brokers were the ones that could “remember” more of the past home sales. The “advice” that brokers gave back then on pricing included “leave some room for negotiation” because nobody wanted to “leave any money on the table.”
Before The Internet – Once the industry started using computers, a “shared database” of information was available that broke the lines of brokers’ books of business. Now every member of the computerized MLS could know what was available in the entire housing market, and they also now had a database of recent home sales that gave everybody the opportunity to have “a great memory” for what homes selling prices.
But because this information was still available to the real estate community, it did very little to change the advice that REALTORs® gave to their clients who needed to sell a home. The thinking was that homebuyers had to get their information through the same network of real estate professionals, so there was no need to change the pricing strategy in the market. But if that was wrong then, it is grossly incorrect now!
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