Work With A Responsible Agent
I was sitting on an open house this past weekend speaking to a couple who was thinking about selling their home and the subject of pricing strategy came up. Potential clients always ask me how we arrive at a listing price for a home and they are usually surprised when I tell them “When you work with us, you pick the listing price”. A responsible agent will not be able to tell you exactly what your home will sell for or what your home is worth. Why…because homes do not sell for an exact price, they sell in a range. Often times, agents will, in attempt to make themselves look like an expert, tell a client what they think a home will sell for, or worse, tell them it will never sell for a certain amount. The final sales price of a home is influenced by many variables including but not limited to: the number of homes available on the market, how your home compares to the other available properties, how your home has been prepared for sale and how well your agent can negotiate. We see ourselves as advisors to our clients and not decision makers; our job is to give our clients all of the relevant information and let them make informed decisions.
I shared with them an example from one of our recent past sales that illustrates this point. Several months ago we sold a property in Monarch Bay Terrace for $4 Million. At the time the property closed, it was the highest sale ever in that community. What was interesting about this particular transaction was that the seller had met with 3 agents prior to meeting with my wife and I; they all fashioned themselves as ‘neighborhood experts’. Every one of them told her that there was no way she would get more than $3.5 Million for her home. When we sat down with her, we asked her what she wanted to get for her home and she told us $3.8 Million. We knew that price was high for the neighborhood but we also knew that she had an extraordinary home that really had many of the attributes that buyers in the area were looking for. After discussing it with her, we decided to list her home at $3,895,000 and we negotiated an offer up to a final sale price of $4 Million. Needless to say, she was overjoyed that we were able to get her $500k more than any other agent thought she could get and $200k more than she originally wanted. Consider how much money this seller would have lost if she had listened to the ‘experts’.
