As professional real estate agents, one of the most important duties of our job is to properly price our listings for market. Getting listings is one thing, selling them is another. Sure, it’s fun to see your name on a sign in a yard, but yard signs don’t pay the bills. There is a right way to price a home, which involves a thorough review of the market - the active competition, the recent sales and the expired listings. The wrong way is to allow your seller to dictate the price. While you do want and need seller input, you need to know in your heart what the right price range is and be able to defend it.
Believe it or not, there are lots of agents out there who don’t particularly care if their listings sell or not. They just want to blanket the town with their signs and will do whatever it takes to procure yet another listing, which often includes overpricing their listings to “win” the seller’s business. However, what they seem to forget is that, as licensed professional real estate agents, it is their duty to be honest and straightforward with their sellers about market value. Our job as real estate agents is not to make friends because we are the highest bidder. Sellers are depending on us and our recommendations in order to make important decisions, so it's important that we know HOW to properly price a home!
To properly price a home is both art and science. While there certainly are objective parameters to help you price a home (square footage, bedrooms, baths, lot size, etc.), the final buying decision is almost always based on emotion and other subjective factors. If there are two identical homes on the same block for sale and one smells good, looks good and feels good, and the other is smoky, poorly furnished and hard to show, there is a difference in market value, which may be hard to objectively demonstrate to a seller.
However, your clients and prospects look at you as the expert. In reality, there is no way to accurately and scientifically place a value on a home - market value is a moving target and can change on a weekly, even daily basis. But sellers understandably want you (the expert) to tell them exactly what their home is worth. So, you should do your best to give them as much hard data as you can to justify your pricing recommendation.
And that's what this next show is about - WHAT data to gather, HOW to gather it and then HOW to put it all together to come up with not only the Right Price, but also a clear, coherent and persuasive analysis to share with your seller client or prospect.
Sound like fun? Please join us!
THE DETAILS
Date: Thursday, July 12th, 2012
Time: 8:00am Pacific / 9:00am Mountain / 10:00am Central / 11:00am Eastern
Duration: 60 - 90 minutes
Equipment Needed: A computer with a high-speed connection and speakers, or a telephone.
Cost: Free to attend live, but you must register, below.
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