Real estate experts agree that the single most important consideration for selling your house is pricing it right. Besides having to be in line with the price of similar homes in the area, the sale price can’t be too high or too low, it should be priced for online searches, and it needs to be set with psychology in mind. Basically, a bunch of factors go into determining the right price. So here are our tips (some with a bit different take on pricing) on how to price your house to sell in Chicago.
1. Stand Objectively in the Buyer’s Shoes
It’s often difficult to do, but to price your house to sell in {market_city], you simply have to be objective and set aside your emotional attachment to your home. This will allow you to more easily, when you run the comps, price according to what comparable homes are selling for, rather than pricing subjectively on the basis of your attachment.
2. Price Outside the Band
Most of the time, prices for comparable homes in an area will tend to bunch up or “band.” For example, homes like yours may all be priced between $184,000 and $187,000. You could, then, price your house to sell at $190,000 because that price is open will make your house stand out from the crowd.
3. Learn From Others’ Mistakes
Before settling on a sale price, take a look at houses that have recently sold in your immediate area, looking carefully at original list prices and actual, final sale prices. What you want to note is how many price cuts and how big a price cut it took for the owner to sell a home. The idea here is to learn from these pricing mistakes and then avoid them.
4. Avoid Century Pricing
This is a tip to help you price your house to sell in Chicago that draws on a well-established pricing tactic, one you see in retail stores all the time. It’s simple and it works – don’t price in zeroes (centuries). When you go to the grocery store or to that big discount store, you never see items priced at $5 or $10. Nope, those items will be $4.99 or $9.95. Even though there’s only a difference of a penny or so, the items seem to be much cheaper. And sometimes the psychology of perception is everything. So you wouldn’t, for example, price your house at $200,000. You would, instead, price it at $199,999 or $198,599.
5. Price for Online Searches
Many people today begin their house hunting online, so your pricing has to take that fact into account as well. Your pricing strategy, then, should reflect the search parameters, especially the price range, that online house hunters use. Most people will search online within a price range from lowest to highest acceptable prices like $175,000 to $200,000. And if you set your price outside that range, say, at $170,000 or $205,000, searchers will never see your listing. Too low is just as bad as too high here, but $199,999 would fall within the search range and still be within a dollar of the maximum.
6. Do Your Own CMA
And just as an agent would, you should perform a comparative market analysis. Although you won’t have access to all the tools an agent would, you can still get a good idea of the market value of your home. Just be sure to look at homes with square footage and amenities close to what yours has, about the same age, listed within the past three months, and no farther away than about half a mile.
There’s a lot you can do on your own to price your house to sell in Chicago. But using a qualified local real estate professional will usually mean better and faster results. A local agent can help with optimum pricing because she’ll likely know about sales in the area/neighborhood that is in progress, but not yet on public record.