Why Home Sellers Should Not Pick a Sales Price

What home sellers don’t know about listing prices can fill a book. What makes a home sell immediately while another lingers on the market? How many days should it take to sell a home in Elk Grove, for example? It depends on which part of Elk Grove and the sales price ranges, but if we look at 95757 for the past 30 days, the average days on market are 53 and 63 cumulative, and the average listed price is $384,794 versus average sales price of $382,061, with an average size of 2,377 square feet. But that’s all homes up to a sales price of more than $600,000. The variance between list price and final sales price is about $1.00 per square foot, not much.

However, if you narrow the search criteria to homes under 1,500 square feet in 95757 over the past 30 days, you will see the smaller, entry-level homes are selling in 12 days over list price. It’s subjective. It’s why home sellers should not pick a sales price without this kind of information.

This is the sort of analysis I prepare for myself when I’m getting ready to list a home in Elk Grove or Sacramento. I also study the competition, meaning homes for sale now, as well, because those are the homes that buyers will see. Buyers won’t see the homes that are sold and, in fact, many of their agents will not share those comparable sales, for a variety of reasons. Home buyers tend to have limited vision because they compare homes that are for sale to other homes that are for sale and then try to discount the sales price from that inventory, which is really an ineffective method to use to buy a home.

That’s not to say that positioning is not important because it is paramount. But in the end, it is always what the market will bear. It’s the figuring out of what the market will bear that separates the struggling real estate agents from the top producers. It’s also a reason why home sellers should never pick a sales price by themselves without input from a seasoned agent.

Sure, sellers own the home and enjoy a vested interest, but they really don’t know how much that home is worth. Being right on the nose is an art developed by experience and backed by numbers. If you’d like to hire a top listing agent in Elk Grove or Sacramento, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.