It’s a given that your selling clients want the absolute most amount of money they can get for their home. But the “right” listing price, the price that gives your sellers as much as the market will bear for their home within a reasonable 30-day time period, may not be the price your sellers want to consider regardless of your comparative market analysis.
How do you guide your clients to the “right” listing price? These tips may help you develop win-win pricing strategies all the way around the transaction.
- Schedule the listing appointment with the sellers at your office rather than at their home. Neutralize the power of place, the property itself, by meeting on your turf within your professional environment.
- Tell your sellers upfront that you are interested in selling the property, not in listing inventory. Tell your selling clients there is “no testing the market” time…that the listing price is the price listed to sell the property at its best price in the shortest amount of time.
- Tell your sellers upfront that the most showings of the home will happen during the first 14-21 days immediately after that the home comes on the market
- If you can swing it, invite 2-3 of your agent colleagues and/or your broker to the meeting so they can tell your sellers how they would price the home and why. Then ask them to leave and ask your sellers how they feel about your colleagues’/broker’s pricing suggestions. Tell them your pricing suggestion based upon comparable sold properties and local market data. If you all agree, great; if you don’t, suggest that your sellers sleep on your suggestion for a night and meet the next day. If they agree, great; if they don’t, likely best to terminate the listing.
- The sellers have slept on your listing price suggestion and agree to it. Great. As everyone signs off on the listing price, give your selling clients a pre-scheduled price reduction plan. The plan is that for every 10 showings or every 14-21 days the house does not sell, the listing price will be reduced by 3%.
- Tell your selling clients that you will change the marketing of the home with every price reduction. You will change the photos (particularly the first, the main photo) so that buying agents are not reminded of the house that was originally priced, in their view, too high.
- Consider charging an upfront refundable marketing fee. This is effective with low-mid priced homes and separates the motivated/serious sellers from the maybe/reluctant sellers. The fee is refunded when the property is sold.
