Pricing Your Home
We help our clients to value their property with a thorough Comparative Market Analysis report using current listing price data and past sold comparable property sales. It’s important that we help you to search the listings on our site to learn about currently listed similar homes in your area. Only by knowing the competition can you make improvements and set a competitive listing price.
What would an upward or lower price adjustment look like based on the current market CMA? Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that the CMA of previously and recently sold similar homes shows that the listing price should be around $235,000. However, those sales were between one month and three months old. Our current market listing CMA shows that similar homes in the neighborhood are listed at $249,000 or thereabouts. We and you may decide that the market is improving and justifies raising the listing price of your home to $245,000 so that it’s still competitive but a better deal for you. Of course, this can work the other way as well.
A proper list price that reflects current and realistic market conditions is critical to getting your property sold quickly. We don’t want you to under–price, but it’s worse to over–price in any market. Buyers discount value by the Days on Market. The longer a home stays on the market, the greater they’ll discount their offers. So, a realistic list price is how we make sure your property sells without languishing on the market.
How do we come up with a suggested list price that reflects your home’s competitive position? It’s a combination of services and experience, and we're going to be very careful and detailed in our analysis and market evaluations to make sure that you don’t leave money on the table or sit around wondering why you aren’t getting offers.
Our evaluation of how your property compares to the current competition is the first step. Then we may suggest some worthwhile corrections you can make to improve that position. Once we know what your home will look like when listed, we’ll go into our thorough CMA, Comparative Market Analysis, process.
CMA of Sold Properties
First, we select comparable properties out of those sold recently and, in the neighborhood, or nearby. These “comparables” or “comps” are selected based on similarity in features, location and characteristics with your home. They must have been sold as recently as possible, so the sold prices are of maximum value.
We then do a thorough “adjustment” process to adjust their sold prices for any differences with your property. If a home has one more bedroom than yours, we adjust that property’s sold price downward for the value of one bedroom to make the comparison “apples to apples.” We make adjustments for garages, bathrooms and other major features to bring our comps to closely compare with your home. Then we use those sold prices to arrive at a preliminary listing price for your home.
We say “preliminary” because we have another CMA step.
CMA of Current Listings
Now we get more comps, but instead they’re properties currently listed and your competition. We go through the same adjustment process, and we come up with another, possibly higher or lower, price suggestion for your home. This second CMA gives us more up–to–date information about the market which could cause us to lower or raise our preliminary list price to adjust to the current market. Using the two CMA results and an experienced analysis of your home’s position in the marketplace, we can set a listing price that will get the job done.
