When you’re thinking about selling your home near Lake Oconee or Lake Sinclair, there may be a lot of considerations on your mind. How quickly will it sell? How many offers will you have? Are there things you can do to make your home sell faster? But one of the top questions we get at the agency involves price. The best advice we can give our clients is to price their home properly. Pricing often controls who will see your listing in a search, whether they think your home is a good value, or other aspects that will impact when your home is seen and how quickly you can move through the selling process. Here’s a quick look at how to price your home right to make sure that it will sell quickly without taking away value that you could capitalize on.
For local realtors right in your own neighborhood, get in touch with the team at Kim and Lin Logan Real Estate. We serve clients when selling and buying homes in Baldwin, Greene, Hancock, Morgan, and Putnam counties.
Want To Sell Your House? Price It Right
Pricing your home can be a bit personal, but generally speaking, you’ll want to start high to leave some amount of room for negotiation with prospective buyers. Though you may get that high offer, or even start a bidding war between two interested parties, that’s not typically the case. Here are the steps that we recommend our clients go through to determine their ideal asking price.
Start With an Appraisal
To begin with, it’s always wise to start with a professional appraisal, which can be a part of the documentation you provide to the buyer. It also provides a great place to determine if you can build additional value. As an example, if your roof is in poor condition, it may appraise poorly, but those details will be on your appraisal report. You can then get a few estimates and decide whether the work is worthwhile to improve the value of your home.
Look at Comparable Sales in Your Area
What are similar homes selling for in your region? If you have a lakeview home with 4 bedrooms and 3 baths on a quarter acre, it will sell at a different price than the same house on two lakeside acres with several outbuildings, including a dock. Look for similar homes to get an idea of what buyers are willing to pay in your area for homes similar to yours.
Get an Expert Opinion
This may be the first point of contact you have with the real estate agent that will sell your home, so don’t just pay attention to the number they provide or going with the highest estimate. Ask questions, such as how long their average home is on the market, whether they’ve sold similar homes in the past, and what their commission percentage will run. This will help you determine how likely it is that your home will sell quickly, what their experience has been, and how much their cut will run.
Take Advantage of Empty Price Bands
Now that you have a rough range of what you could sell your home for, it’s time to start hunting for areas where you can make it stand out. Price bands are areas in a search where home prices tend to clump. Instead of competing with other homeowners at $574,000, $575,000, and $576,000, look at what the next price will be. If the next home price group is around $595,000, you may want to price your home somewhere in the $580,000-$585,000 range so that your home stands out from the rest.
Price for Common Online Search Ranges
One thing to consider is to not price your home out of common search ranges. Using our $599,999 example above, that home would show up in a search for home from $575,000 to $600,000. By comparison, a home priced at $601,000 will not. If most of the homes selling in your area are within a specific online search range, try to price to the top of that search range to capture more interest in your home as a better option, rather than a lesser option at the bottom of a higher range.
Price High to Leave Room to Cut
Generally speaking, if you’re not in a rush to sell quickly, you’ll want to price towards the higher side of your range. This is because though you would love to have a couple of interested parties start a bidding war, the usual circumstance is that you’ll end up getting offers that are lower than your asking price. By pricing high to begin with, you’ll have room to cut your price without cutting into your home’s equity. By realizing that you’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle of your ideal price range, you’ll still make money on the sale while being able to negotiate with interested parties.
What’s the Bottom Line for Pricing Your Home?
The bottom line for pricing your home is that selling a house can be a very personal process, and it can be difficult to put a price on the happy memories you’ve created there over the years. However, by using several outside sources to hone in on your asking price range and then fine-tuning that range with price banding, and online search ranges, you’ll be able to come up with a smart asking price that will give you what you want without taking what you need. Ready to get a price estimate from a great real estate agent in the area? Contact us today to get started! Our experienced team is happy to help you determine the perfect asking price for your home.
To see what is currently for sale, take a look at available Lake Oconee real estate listings to see all homes and lots available near Lake Oconee.
