This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift
If you’re chasing the market down, chances are you’ll never catch it. The trick to pricing a home for sale is to race the market down.
How’s that again? We’re in a declining market, that’s understood. It won’t be this way forever, but prices could continue their slow leak for quite a while longer.
What that means is that, whatever price you might get for your home today, you will probably get still less a month from now or three months from now.
Hence, you need to make a difficult decision.
If you don’t actually need to sell right now, you might do better putting your move off for two or three years.
But suppose instead that you do need to sell your house right now. You have a job offer out of town. You have a big deposit on a new home. You’re expecting triplets. What now?
Even in the best of markets, sellers can have an inflated idea of the value of their homes. This has certainly been the case in the two years since the market turned. We’ve had a glut of inventory, but much of that has been overpriced inventory.
Typically, the seller starts out with the price too high, then tries to chase the market down with a series of price reductions — usually too little and too late.
If your house is not showing, it cannot sell. But if it isn’t showing, this almost always means it is overpriced. The trick to getting it sold now is to price it under the competitive listings.
The natural impetus, in the face of advice like this, is to say, “I don’t want to give my house away!”
Who can blame you for feeling that way? But the important question is, “Would you rather hang onto it for a few more months, and then sell it for even less — if you are able to sell it at all?”
Racing the market down can be a painful decision. But the pain is likely to be a lot worse if you continue to try to chase the market down instead.
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