Sept. 14, 2007: If you assume the worst, what can you do to get your Metro Phoenix home sold now?
The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
-- William Shakespeare, Richard II
I am too familiar with my own ignorance to credit other people's predictions for the real estate market. People who think they can foresee the consequences of billions of choices years in advance are fooling themselves -- although probably not as completely as they are fooling their audiences.
Even so, a would-be home-seller listening to all the doom and gloom predictions on the news may by now be in deep despair, crying, like King Richard, "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."
I don't believe any of this, but let's stipulate it for argument's sake. In reality, so far, resale prices for some of the hardest hit residential communities in the Valley are down around 16.4% from the December 2005 peak. This means those same homes are still up 54.1% in value from December 2003.
If we anticipate the worst -- mass foreclosures, with lenders dumping properties for pennies on the dollar -- what can you do now to escape ruin?
The answer? Price your property to sell.
If you live in an archetypical suburban Phoenix home, your house is worth today just about what it would have sold for in April or May of 2005. If you're priced higher than that, you may be priced too high to sell.
Here's another way of arriving at a reasonable price. Take the sales prices of truly comparable homes that sold last month in your neighborhood and subtract at least 3%.
This can't be happy news, considering how much you might have gotten two years ago. But if there is worse news to come, this is the happiest news you may hear for a while.
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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