I keep hearing the same thing over and over again from real estate agents: too many home owners are unrealistic about the sale price of their home. A lot of them still think that prices are skyrocketing, or at the very least that their home increased in value a whole lot more in 2007 than it really did.
The result? Homes are staying on the market longer, and often going through multiple agents in the process.
So here’s some advice for you if you’ve got your home on the market – be realistic about the sale price, and listen to your real estate agent. Get multiple opinions, as that can help, but heed their advice.
An agent was telling me the other day about a property she had listed in the boom times of 2007. Early on in the campaign she received a cash offer of $2.8 million, which the owner knocked back. He said he could do better than that. Well, no better offers came in, so he switched camps and went with another agent.
I think a fair bit of time passed before he commenced the auction programme with the next agent, and by this stage the property market had slowed considerably. The effect of interest rates had kicked in, and people were being very cautious. Anyway, on auction day the highest bid to come in was $1.7 million …. that’s a cool $1.1 million under his previous offer, and he lost it because he tried to be too greedy. He hadn’t read the market properly, and he paid the price.
I guess the moral of the story is that you need to be reasonable with regard to an acceptable sale price for your home. Prices have stalled, and in some cases they might have gone backwards. So listen to your agent, and if a good offer comes in early, don’t just knock it back because you reckon you can do better.