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Home Selling Tips
Price your property right
Once a property fails to sell at its debut price, the time it spends on the market can encourage buyers to become more aggressive in negotiating. Price reductions can further encourage aggressive bargaining. If you under-price your home by $5,000, you might lose as much as $5,000.; however, if you over-price it by the same amount, you can actually lose much more. In a 2002 study, homes without a price reduction sold for 97% of initial list price, whereas homes with a price reduction sold for 88% of initial list price, a difference likely greater than the amount of the price reduction.
Set your price to show up in web searches
Real estate sites typically filter price in $25,000 or $50,000 increments. A home selling for $550,000 will be seen by more buyers than a home selling for $555,000 because the $555,000 home will be excluded by buyers who set $550,000 as their maximum price. Moving from one price band down to the next can increase online activity by as much as 7%. Since few marketing activities can increase traffic by more than 5%, this effect is worth considering for properties that would otherwise be priced just above these thresholds.
Debut your listing on Friday
A listing’s debut is, by far, its most important marketing event. The timing of that event affects its impact.
According to a December 2007 analysis of Redfin’s web site traffic for 119,079 listings in seven markets, listings that debuted on the best day, Friday, got on average 7.7% more visitors in their first seven days than those that debuted on the worst day, Thursday. Buyers searching for new listings to tour over the weekend may account for this effect. The second best day to debut is Tuesday, likely because that is broker open house day.
Spend a little to get a lot
A 2007 HomeGain survey of 2000 real estate agents showed that spending between $5,000-$8,000 on the top ten home improvements can increase the value of your property by $20,000 or more.
On the North Shore, four activities return more than $300 for every $100 invested:
| For each $100 invested in: | Seller receives an extra |
|---|---|
| Cleaning and decluttering | $439 |
| Professional home staging | $351 |
| Landscaping | $332 |
| Lightening and brightening | $315 |
Make sure your property shows well online
In Illinois, over 80% of buyers research properties online before visiting and 32% say they first learned about the home they purchased through the Internet. According to a 2007 ZipRealty study, 33% of buyers said that not enough photos or poor quality photos on the Internet caused them to eliminate a home from consideration. Don’t list your property without having the main rooms staged and photographed.
When selling your home, stay put
Research found that vacant homes are more likely to undergo a price reduction than occupied homes. This may be in part because buyers perceive that the owners are anxious to sell and more likely to negotiate. Even more importantly, it is because buyers have difficulty picturing how their things will fit in an empty house with no furniture as a frame of reference. If you have to move before your house is sold, you should strongly consider having it staged. Research shows that a staged home will sell faster than an empty home.
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Did you know…?
A buyer forms an impression about your home within the first 15 seconds of seeing it!
So make sure it’s a great impression by staging it professionally.
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Anne West
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