Friday, September 29, 2006

Trying to maximize your sales price? You can't "wait for your price"

After a summer slowdown and an inverted real estate season, home sales in the Riverside area haved picked up in September. There are buyers, albeit fewer than a year ago, and they are making offers. And homes that are priced appropriately -- based on the Sold comps, not the Active listings -- are selling.

Our listings have registered 25 showings this month through our Internet tracking system, which counts how many times an individual agent opened the lockboxes to obtain a key to the home. Compare that with an average of about six showings a month in June, July and August!

There are more than 200 homes on the market in the Orangecrest neighborhood. That's three times the number for sale a year ago. With the number of home sales down about 40 percent from a year ago, and the fierce competition from home builders offering many great incentives, there are tough times out there for many sellers. Many of the homes that have been on the market for more than 60 days are those that have been priced too high. If home prices continue to drift downward, as they have been the past few months, those sellers who aren't attuned to the trend will fall farther and farther behind, and consequently, lose more and more.

Imagine turning down an offer a few months ago because it seemed like a lowball offer. And now, as the market has turned, you've dropped your price to the very same amount that someone previously offered. ... It can be painful. Now, you're praying for that offer to come back.

How do you make sure it doesn't happen to you? Price it right, from the start. Time is not your friend now. The days of, "I'm not in a hurry to sell my home. I can wait for my price," are over. If you try to wait for an above-market price now, you may be waiting five years. When the market is flat-lined or heading down, and you want the highest price possible, you are in a hurry. More time most likely will mean less money, not more.

And hire the right Realtor. The old days of slapping up a sign and counting the multiple offers are gone -- for now. You have to expose your home to every potential buyer out there, immediately. The MLS is only one tool. Your Realtor should be plastering your home all over the Internet, including Realtor.com Featured listings, which garner 10 times the number of views as traditional entries, the plethora of real estate portal sites, and most importantly, regional real estate sites, such as www.LiveInOrangecrest.com.

Next, make sure your Realtor is doing more than the basic cliche-ridden marketing that does nothing to set your home apart from the competition. This is marketing, which means "attracting" potential buyers to your home. A reiterated laundry list of your home's features in the Description field capped off with "This one won't last," is the last thing you need. Are there the maximum number of photos and Virtual Tours? That's a bare minimum to have the best chances of success.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some agents insist that sellers price their homes under the competition to generate attention, while others are urging clients to shave 10 percent off the price if there have been no showings or showings but with no offers after a certain length of time.

Other agents are telling their clients to increase asking prices to line them up with the increments of $5,000 to $25,000 used by Internet house hunters, according to the Journal. A home priced at $474,500, for instance, should be listed at $475,000, according to Kerwin Holloway of Reece & Nichols. The original asking price puts it in the high end of the $450,000-to-$475,000 range, says Holloway, while boosting the price slightly made it appear to be a bargain to those searching in the $475,000-plus segment.

Sellers also are increasingly offering such incentives as paid closing costs, media rooms, and day-care assistance or writing personal letters to prospective buyers to showcase the neighborhood's positive points, the Journal article said. Meanwhile, builders are implementing new strategies, such as adjusting prices or offering cash refunds if home prices in their developments decline before a buyer closes.

What will work for you? There are many factors to make a success story in today's real estate market. Pricing, staging and marketing are just the beginning. Call Scott & Brian for a free consultation and find out how to do the best you can. Before the market drifts even lower.

Labels: Corona, Foreclosure, Home Prices, Inland Empire, Loan Modification, Moreno Valley, Murrieta, Real Estate, Riverside, Short Sales, Statistics, Temecula