The Challenge to Price Your Lakeland FL Home?
In one of my recent post about, “Pricing Your Lakeland FL Home” I wrote about the importance of pricing your home to sell. Most of the commenters thought it was a very good post because it was featured. Featured or not, there was one commenter, who is a consumer and probably the most important one in the eyes and those of real estate agents. She was perhaps a little upset about my article, so I thought I would share her comment here for everyone to read:
Am I missing somthing ? you didnt tell us crap i clicked on this sight to get an idea of what to list my house for here in lakeland and all im reading is sellers should not over price ,well yeah?
I did respond to her comment and explained to her that she was missing my point that I tried to convey in this article. I don’t want to reiterate here what I replied to her because most consumers who are interested in selling their homes should know not to overprice their home. Needless to say, her comment really struck a chord with me as I thought about this the whole weekend as to how to convey a clear message and educate consumers to the best of my abilities. Clearly, she wanted more information or insights on how to price her Lakeland home and she thought she could find it right here on my blog or on my website.
How to price your Lakeland FL Home?
As a homeowner, abandoning your personal point of view about your home is a great start. Buyers really don’t care how much you paid for the home or how much money you need to purchase your next home. Nor do they care how much you have invested into your home for things like painting, upgrading your 20 year old kitchen, landscaping or other improvements.
You can hop over to Zillow and Trulia to get an estimated value, but are these true values? No, you should never solely rely on Zillow’s and Trulia’s market reports. Real estate is local and for a homeowner to get an understanding on how to price their Lakeland home, let me suggest to visit homes that are for sale within your neighborhood. Visit open houses, consider also price per square foot for homes in your neighborhood. Pay close attention to homes that have recently sold in your neighborhood. Homes that have sold represent market value.Market Value = Meeting of the minds between buyer and seller.
A lot of homeowners willing to assist the home buyer with sellers concessions, such as pay some of the buyer’s closing costs. Buyers may look for homes to move in right away, so attracting homes that are in move-in conditions are very enticing to them. Your flexibility will lead you to more buyers and ultimately will sell your home faster.
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Search for Lakeland FL homes for sale within your neighborhood or a 1/2 mile radius. Then ask yourself, which of the three or four homes would you pick out, the home that is priced the highest?
You can hire an appraiser to get an appraised value of your home. An appraiser certainly provides you with detailed information about your home, comparable homes and market condition. However, will the market value that the appraiser puts on the appraisal be your sales price? It depends on you the seller and the buyer. An appraised value is not market value and the appraiser certainly can overvalue or undervalue your home. An appraisal is great tool which a short life expectancy.
Inviting local real estate agents to your home doing a comparable market analysis (CMA) to get their opinion of a selling price is the best way. I would not rely on one CMA, try to get three. Agents might just give you what you want to hear, by “buying your listing. When doing a CMA for a potential seller, there is a lot of time being spent on researching, so local agents can provide to a Lakeland FL home seller a price range of what the home could sell for at the time of providing the analysis.