May 12, 2006: Let Realtor do his job and price your house for the Phoenix real estate marketplace
Here's how to get yourself in trouble when you price your home for sale.
First, collect a whole lot of information from wildly unreliable sources. Public records are almost always hugely out of date. The sales figures published in the newspaper almost never give you enough details to distinguish recently sold homes from your own. And your former neighbors are almost always fibbing when they tell you what they got for their homes.
The second step of the process is elevation by divination. Bill's house has a bad front lawn, so my house must be worth more. Janet's house had those hideous mustard-yellow drapes, so my house must be worth more. That custom entertainment center I built - the one that fits my TV only - cost $500, but it adds at least $4,000 to the value of my home.
The next step in the process is interviewing Realtors. Some will come with very detailed information about recent sales and currently active listings. A well-prepared Realtor should be able to tell you exactly what price your home will command in current market conditions. But other Realtors may be less prepared - or more pliable. They may surmise that they will get the listing if they "give in" on your price.
Now stop for a moment and think what you - and your attorney! - would do to a dentist who let you pick which tooth to drill. When you sit down with a Realtor, only one of you knows how to price a home to the marketplace. Trying to second-guess and micromanage your Realtor may not be quite the same thing as grabbing the stick out of the hands of a jet pilot - at least not until you crash and burn.
So you have a bad idea about what neighboring homes are worth, and a bad idea about what your home is worth in comparison. If you have carefully selected the weakest-willed of the Realtors you interviewed, you have everything you need to languish on market for months on end, selling in the end at a deep discount.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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Am I link-baiting? You bet. The quid pro quo is free content for your site that pulls eyeballs and excites interest.<a href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/" target="_blank"> Phoenix Realtor Greg Swann</a> suggested I share this with you:
