Thousands of listing leads expired across the USA every single day, ending up as listing fodder for hungry agents looking for more work. You’ve seen them in your MLS, likely prospected them yourself, and if you’re buying seller leads you may actually be spending money on them right now. Thousands of new expireds, every single day.
So why did all these listings expire? Most of the time those expired listings didn’t sell because they were overpriced, so ask yourself an important question: do you want to be one of the agents wasting time, energy & money creating future expired leads? Odds are the answer is no.
So let’s talk about pricing: every homeowner wants to get the most value from their home sale possible, and many homeowners over-estimate the value of their home. Why not? They’re not agents, and they do have a positive bias – and they’ll often push you as an agent to list at a price above what you know is right because of their ambition to make as much as possible from the sale.
The point of this article – as well as all pricing scripts – is not to be RIGHT, it’s to DO what’s RIGHT by advising your sellers how to get the most for their home in the least time, without creating an over-priced situation.
Secret: Your first offer is almost always your best offer, and sometimes is your only offer. Pricing it right in the first place makes that offer come in faster and stronger!
Secret: Whenever you find yourself in contention with your sellers, it’s time to back down. Your ego is what’s preventing the sale. Let the seller be right and revisit the price later if necessary.
Your Listing Strategy For Success:
Determine the likely sale price based on your real comparable sales. Once that’s determined, find a sale at that price that happened right away, selling very close or over it’s list price. Then find a second comparable that sold at that same price or less, but started higher, had longer days on the market and maybe even 2 or 3 agents before it finally sold.
Here’s an example:
Your subject property should sell, according to your most recent and best comparable sales, for $400,000.
House A from your SOLD comps, was listed at $399,000, sold in 3 days, for $410,000. It shows that it also had a back up offer and closed within 60 days of it’s original list price.
House B from your SOLD comps, was listed at $435,000 sold in 193 days, for $380,000. It shows 2 different listing agents in the 6 months it was on the market. Not only did the home owner end up taking $20k less than House A, but in the mean time they had to make 6 months of house payments, property tax payments, HOA dues and home owner’s insurance, thus netting them even less than the $20k under where it should have sold, had they priced it right in the first place.
Additionally, House B had to live through more showings, repaint the interior, suffer 3 price reductions and 5 open houses before it finally sold.
Which home owner was the happier seller? Which ended up with more money in their pocket in less time?
Show this data to your seller – giving them facts speaks louder than getting into an ego-driven debate about listing at ‘YOUR PRICE’ versus the seller’s price. Remove your ego and use real world scenarios to paint a picture. Using House A and House B makes it about the situation, versus making it about you versus the seller.
Secret: In escalating markets, this still works, the numbers are just over list. You CAN over price a home in hot markets. That sets you up for appraisal issues. To avoid having to be ‘back on the market’ at the more reasonable price, just price it where it should be in the first place!
Learn more in our member learning portal >>
