Successfully selling your home in today’s market takes at minimum 3 key ingredients.
1. Proper Pricing
2. Marketing
3. Agent that can navigate the waters and get home from pending to closing
Hiring an agent that helps the seller accept the correct contract and navigates it to closing is probably the most important aspect because you never wish to have to sell the same home multiple times. It’s always best to select best offer and close it first time.
If the home is marketed and priced correctly in many cases there will be multiple buyers, not because the home is under-priced but rather because it’s properly valued and substantially exposed to the market.
So let’s set aside marketing for a moment and discuss pricing. Some properties are fairly easy to value, especially when there are similar floor plans in a subdivision and several recent sales to choose from. Not all homes are located in defined subdivisions, and sometimes in today’s market there is an absence of like kind properties that have sold.
For years agents have compared subject properties to all available comparables the agent could find. While the research was important and the best available at the time, there is now a new way to look at the overall picture. Several factors beyond what neighbors sold their home for affect the value. For instance, job growth, population growth, community lifestyle, schools, safety, affordability, potential appreciation and more affect a buyer’s decision on which home to buy.
At the Ellis Team we’ve invested significant money and research into developing systems to gather data, analyze, and report these factors and ratings. All Realtors in the Fort Myers/Cape Coral MLS have access to certain reports like ReaList that we reported on a few months ago. Zillow also offers some limited information. ReaList, Trulia, and Zillow offer their free home valuation tool, and pretty much everyone in the industry agrees it’s a fun informational tool but cannot be relied upon as fact when determining value.
We like to look at them because buyers look at them and think their estimate is Gospel, so agents spend a lot of time educating public about how accurate they may or may not be.
The Ellis Team at RE/MAX not only looks at comparables, estimates from third party sites like those mentioned above, and tax data, we also utilize additional research that helps our sellers better price their home. Sellers overprice in any market regardless of whether it’s going up down, or sideways. Our goal is to get you out at the best price and expose your home to the masses so we can select the best offer available.
If you’re thinking of selling, give us a call 239-489-4042 or email me at brett@topagent.com We’ll be glad to sit down and show you how we market, how we negotiate and select the best offer, and how best to price your home.