how to price your house to sell

geoffky

So, despite everything, you decide to put your house on the market. It's not that you want to move, you have to move. But, you know to get three estate agents in to give valuations. The first one tells you how lovely your home is and he is confident he can sell for £425,000. It's a bit less than you had hoped for but not terrible. Agent No 2 is again charmed, he claims to have sold on the next street for £400,000 and is sure he can get the same for you. Agent No 3 likes what he sees and suggests a price of £330,000.
Now, which one of these three are you likely to go with? If you say agents No 1 or No 2 you are wrong because, in the current climate, it is all about creating a buzz and excitement at the wondrous value you are providing.
It's called shorting the market and the idea is you achieve a quick, clean sale at the asking price – or even a little bit above it occasionally – by setting the price lower than you feel you should achieve, rather than continually cutting the price and ultimately selling for less than the lowest guide suggested (known as chasing the market down) after months holding out for a higher offer.
"If you are unrealistic today you will end up chasing the market down," says Jonathan Hewlett of Savills. "In order to sell quickly and swiftly vendors have to put their property on a lower price to achieve what they want."



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/4374839/First-person-how-to-price-your-house.html

QTPie

Sounds about right to me: if you want to sell now, I think that you have to be REALLY motivated to sell... If you aren't and you don't price accordingly, don't expect a lot of interest.

I think that, unwittingly, we are trying to chase the market down: idenitcal house sold at £465k in July, we put ours on market in Nov at £459k (hoping to attract some serious viewings and OIR) £430k), got an offer of £420k in earlu December, accepted it, proceeded with it (buyers demanded completion date of 5 Feb), buyers stalled Valuation in mid Jan and then demanded price reduction to £380k (gazundered), we didn't negotiate (was in shock, but don't they would have budged on £380k), house sale fell through. On agent's advice, reduced price to £449k (just below Rightmove search band threshold), but not one request for viewing in the two weeks since that was done. So I assume that nobody is interested in our house within 10% of that. We could cut price a bit more, but I think that would be chasing down the market and send out the wrong signals...

If you want to sell at the moment, I think that you have to price aggressively... Most people want a bargain and wont consider anything else.

QT

Robert_Sterling_3

geoffky wrote: »

"In order to sell quickly and swiftly vendors have to put their property on a lower price to achieve what they want."

What they want is a higher price.

Doozergirl

That's what I've always suggested to people looking for a quick sale. Create competition and get the best price that way.

I once suggested to an EA that I would do it on one of our houses and he just balked. We didn't do it - I wouldn't have done unless encouraged.

The good point there is whether people see it as a point to barter down in this market. The suggestion of setting the guide price higher than you would like in order for people to bat you down completely defeats the initial objective. How do you wrangle with setting your asking price lower for a quick sale and then raise it to expect lower offers? Was the person suggesting that born with a brain?

You have to set it low enough to make people want to fight over it.

_bankrupted

I own several properties in Spain. And if you think the UK is bad then read up about the Spanish property market!

You can see identical properties in the same urbanizacion, with wild variation in price. Literally the higher priced sellers have absolutely no idea what is going on. Before this crash typical sales times were of the order approaching 2 years.

I am in the process of selling one apartment and from intial advertisment to buyer agreeing to buy was 2 weeks. This was achieved by pricing the apartment at about 30% lower than the lowest (that's lowest!!) of a similar type/postion etc.

I am almost certain that given the outlook for Spain in 18 months asking prices for similar apartments will be what I ask for mine today and 24-36 months lower still.

It will be very similar here in the UK (not quite as bad as Spain though). So if you want or need to sell you have to price accordingly for what buyers perceive to be a fantastic bargain. Of course 12 months time it won't appear to be that fantastic.

I was realtively optimistic about the scale of the decline 6 months ago. Today I think it's going to be a long and severe correction.

It's all psychology. What you may consider today to be an extremley disappointing offer, I am sure will be considered an unbelievable offer in in 18 months.

bratcatcher

We did it in order to sell. Our house had been on the market since July, reducing the price periodically to keep interest on it but when we saw the house we wanted to buy in late December, the estate agent suggested reducing it massively saying that by doing that in the new year (we did take it off the market for a couple of months over christmas) then interest would be stimulated and we would get a offer closer to the asking price. It worked but was scary as we had no viewings for the first 2 weeks, but it was Jan - then suddenly mid Jan we had loads and sold it for just 2,500k under the asking price which was what we would have accepted originally anyway.