I recently sat through a teleseminar regarding short sales and the instructor had some interesting ideas regarding pricing on short sales to which not a lot of agents in my area are subscribing. He said that he always prices his short sale listings at market or maybe even a little bit above. Hmmm...my first reaction was wow, that's kind of scary to think about doing. What if the house sits and doesn't sell?? Right?
Pricing a short sale listing at or slightly above market will prove where the market really is for this property. If you are doing your due diligence as an agent you will have full listing history and showing history for the property, correct? So if and when the bank comes back to you as the listing agent and says we want X dollars for this property, what are you going to do?
You're going to pull out the history and show them, look: at a price of $350,000 we only had one showing. When we dropped it down to $325,000 we had about three showings every week for two weeks but no offers. When we dropped the price down to $300,000 two weeks later, we had eleven groups through and five offers. The seller ended up choosing an offer from a buyer who offered $315,000, was fully approved for a loan and had enough cash reserves to buy the house for cash.
The point is this: Instead of under pricing a short sale property just to get an offer to the bank, you will be doing your job by getting the top dollar for the propety. The other advantage to this schematic is that the buyer who comes in super low may be doing this on fifteen other properties waiting for the first house to get approved. Then where are you with the bank? You don't have an offer any longer and it becomes an issue.
I'd love to hear your opinion on this strategy for pricing short sales. Please leave me your comments below! Thanks~
Susan Manning, Real Estate Agent
License #01481594
Realty Executives of Temecula Valley
951-551-7790 cell
951-326-3100 x3155 office
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