In my previous post, I talked about pricing your home to sell regardless of what you might want or “need” in  order to move from your current home to another home.

People move for all kinds of reasons:

• retirement
• job opportunity
• divorce
• illness

The important thing to remember is that you want your house to sell regardless of the reason why.

This point was bought home in a comment on my most recent post by South Carolina Realtor, Mark Brian:

I often ask someone if they want to list their home or SELL their home when it comes to selecting a realistic price…

This is an important distinction.  Many people like to test the market by pricing their home at a price they would really love.  Some DIY real estate websites call this the “Make Me Move” price.  It’s something so attractive that even if the home owner wasn’t really serious, the offered price is too good to turn down.  Unfortunately, unless the person offering the “Make Me Move” price can pay for the house in cash an appraiser is going to come along and spoil the party.

If you really want to sell your house, you really need to price it where someone will buy it.  Someone who may need to get a mortgage and get an appraiser to say, “Yes, this house is worth what the contract price says it’s worth.”

True Story #2

This has happened to me more than once.

I was asked by a woman to list her modest townhome in Greenbelt, MD toward the end of the huge real estate boom.  Prices had already started to decline but they hadn’t quite fallen off the cliff and there were still buyers who could qualify for a mortgage.

Well, the house had several showings and, in fact, one or two low ball offers had come in from real estate investor wannabes.  People who stay up late at night and believe the infomercials and actually buy the DVD sets.  The seller wisely turned these down.

One day, a serious offer came in but it was about $5,000 lower than the home owner’s asking price.  The offer also asked for the seller to kick in closing costs on behalf of the home buyer. The home seller wasn’t too fond of this offer even though it was pretty reasonable and the house had been on the market for awhile

The home seller’s reaction to this offer was….wait for it….

I’m not gonna give my house away!

Well, she wasn’t going to “give it away” in the first place but she had this idea in her head that her house was worth more and she was going to hold fast until she got it.

The person who made that offer withdrew and the home continued to sit…and sit…and sit on the market. Remember, this was the beginning of the end.  Although, it’s impossible to predict exactly how the market is going to turn, it’s easy to know that if there are no buyers for your house, that means the market is saying it’s priced too high.  Everything sells at the right price.

About three months later another offer came in.  This offer was fully $30,000 less than the offer she had turned down.  That’s right. This particular client lost $30,000 because she didn’t want to “give it away” when there was a decent (not perfect) offer on the table.

Luckily, she was able to accept the offer and sell the house.  By the time this second offer came in, she was not only ready to move she was on the verge of being desperate to move.  She was what we call in the real estate world “a motivated seller”.

It’s really a shame more home owners don’t have the same level of “motivation” to sell their home when they first put it on the market.  It would save a ton of time and, more importantly, add a lot of money to the home seller’s bank account.

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