This is from my Arizona Republic column:
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 Public records are almost always hugely out of date.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.
Now, when you interview Realtors, be sure to pick the one who is easiest to dominate. After all, it’s your house. Shouldn’t you set the 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, armed with a weak-willed Realtor and really bad ideas on price, you’re ready to take on the world: “You have everything you need to languish on market for months on end, selling in the end at a deep discount.”
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Fabia Rorive says:
Three years ago, we went to sell our house. We were armed with little to no information, only a desire to sell and not have it on the market for long. Had it been up to us, we would have undersold, but we met a wonderful realtor who told us that he could not list it for less than… and said we had to trust him.
We did trust him, and the place sold for more than we listed. I suggest to all of my friends who are buying or selling to find a good realtor they can trust and listen to the advice given.
September 26, 2006 — 3:52 pm
jf.sellsius says:
I prefer zillow and the zillow statisticians to do the work for me.
September 26, 2006 — 6:55 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I suggest to all of my friends who are buying or selling to find a good realtor they can trust and listen to the advice given.
Send me your mailing address. I should pay for advice that good!
September 30, 2006 — 3:47 pm