Pricing Your Home

Price too high and your home may languish on the market. Price too low and you may short-change yourself in a recovering real estate market.

Let’s work together to research market conditions and share a candid conversation about pricing your home. One of my main goals is to help you become an educated seller who really understands your local real estate market.

We’ll make a detailed review of comparable home sales in your area during the past 3-6 months, as well as assess comparable homes currently for sale. Of course, the condition of your home will make a difference in its price and we’ll look at that together.

My analysis of comparable home sales will go well beyond what the real estate industry refers to as a Comparable Market Analysis (CMA). A CMA examines the prices at which similar properties in the same area recently sold. It’s important to understand, however, that a CMA analysis does not include or reflect many variables that can be extremely important for telling you how much your home actually is worth in today’s market.

The reasons are simple: many homes that have closed in the preceding six months may resemble your home sufficiently to be called “comparable sales” but, in fact, really are not at all either comparable or identical. Homes located near your home can be quite different in condition, upgrades, orientation to the sun, amenities and not least of all, location in relation to busy thoroughfares, neighbor’s walls, industrial sites or utilities.

Since no two properties are identical, it takes a knowledgeable real estate agent to make adjustments in CMA results for the differences between sold properties and a realistic sale price for your property based on a host of variables including lot size, upgrades, condition, location and other considerations.

We will not only look at prices and sales recently but a year ago, six and three months ago. Are prices going up or down – and by how much? How many days are homes staying on the market? Seasonal or other factors? Who are the buyers? People new to the area or residents upgrading their homes or both? We also will pay special attention to the difference between list prices and sales prices. Are homes comparable to yours selling for more or less than the list price?

We’ll review comparable homes for sale in and near your neighborhood. Some of these homes probably will have open houses during the time that we’re pricing your home. We can select a few of these local open houses of properties for sale that would be worthwhile visiting. The purpose would be for you to see first-hand whether your home actually is in better or worse shape than these properties for sale and how your home price compares.

During this time, everything about your property, including some photos and possibly videos, where it is located (including a Google map with zooming and satellite views), complete information about the community, its schools for every age-group, and population, will be included in my Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices website. http://www.bhhscalifornia.com/real-estate-agent/jeremy-burns/1335