Are Your Sellers Helping the Competition?

Two Top Pricing Techniques for Pricing Listings Right From 21 Ways to Get Your Listings Priced Right…  (Despite the Seller’s Best Objections)

by Julie Escobar

I’ve been talking to a lot of brokers lately who are eager to ensure their agents are pricing their listings right the FIRST time.  I wanted to share a couple of my favorite techniques from my eBook 21 Ways to Get Your Listings Priced Right…  (Despite the Seller’s Best Objections) with you!  Use them in good health and Happy Listing!

Dilemma #1:  Seller Wants to Their Price — Period. 

Technique:  Overpricing your home in today’s market can actually help sell  other listings.

Dialogue: “Put yourself in the shoes of the buyer.  They’ve got an agent and they’re looking at listings that are priced at market value, show well and have motivated sellers.

If they look at your home and a comparable home and all things being relatively equal, both are 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2600 sq. ft. homes and both show well but yours is $50,000+ above market value, which home is going to look more attractive to them when it comes to a bottom line decision for their family? 

In fact, when it comes to choosing their property, if your home is overpriced, you’ve just made the lesser priced home look perfect by comparison.  They can feel good about their decision to get the same sized home for less!”

You can also pull comparables from your MLS to show real world applications of this. 

Another point to make here with the sellers is to share with them the absolute fact that most people start their search for homes online and we’re a web-savvy nation of consumers.

That means that if they overprice their home today and it goes online via the MLS and your multiple web listing portals, their home won’t even have the benefit of SHOWING up when consumers are searching by price in your market area. 

They’ve just priced themselves right off the internet search – eliminating the possibility of that 85+% of consumers who start their search there.   Definitely food for thought!

Dilemma #2:   “But I paid more than that for the house when I bought it!”

In tough markets you’ll hear this one a lot.  Handling it requires empathy and care.  Here’s some great dialogue to get you over this hurdle:

“The truth is that’s the case for many folks.  Unfortunately, in terms of the law of supply and demand, what you paid for the house doesn’t have any bearing on what it’s worth in today’s market. 

Let me ask you a question.  What if you were given the property for free when you moved in, or you won the house lottery or inherited the home and it cost you nothing?

Would it be worth nothing when it came time to sell? 

Of course not. 

Just like anything else, your home is worth what the current market will bear.  

Based on the comparables I’ve found, and what the current market trends are telling us, $_______ is the price that a ready, willing and able buyer would likely be willing to pay for your property. 

So, I guess what I need to ask is do you still want to sell your home?  If so, then we need to price it for the current market, not the price that you paid _____  years ago.  Do you want to move forward?”

I hope these two techniques are helpful!  Work with the words and make them your own, talk them out, role-play with a colleague or your broker until you feel comfortable with them.  And good luck out there!

If you want to learn more pricing techniques -  click here to visit our 21 Ways to Get Your Listings Priced Right page now!