Determining Market Price is an essential component to a competent sale.

You're planning on selling a house. Now you have to decide what price you're going to ask. This is one of the most important and difficult decisions you'll have to make.

Buyers select by comparison shopping, so your home will have to have a fair market price in order for it to sell. As a real estate professional familiar with the market, I can help you determine the approximate market value of your home and then use all my marketing skills to help you obtain top-dollar.

Some of the things to consider when choosing your home price are:

Remember, your home is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. When you sell your home through me, you can be assured that your property will receive all the exposure necessary to attract Buyers who might be interested in putting in an offer assuming that the price is right.

But what happens if all the Buyers in the market decide that you are simply asking far too much?

In this situation, unfortunately, even the best marketing is unlikely to get your house sold! Chances are that it will sit and languish on the market until that painful day when you finally conceed that you need to lower your price expectations. Hopefully, you will be quick in making that determination. Because the longer a house sits and languishes unsold, the lower the ultimate selling price that can be expected! It is a sad fact that after sitting just a few weeks unsold the market seems to register that it has become "shop-soiled" and that it must be "undesirable" for the sheer fact that it still hasn't sold!!

Contrast this with a scenario where you have put your house on the market for a relatively reasonable price - though still, perhaps, somewhat more than you ultimately expect. In this situation, as soon as it goes on the market and an interested Buyer sees it, he/she is going to entertain the fear & dread that someone else might make an offer before he/she does. So, the Buyer is likely to act with a significant sense of urgency and make a generous offer before someone else makes a competing bid. With luck, of course, you will get that second or third bid. One way or another, you will get at least a price close to what you were looking for!

You see, psychology is everything!

By pricing your property right, you are appealing to the Fear Factor in your prospective Buyers. - Fear that, if they don't act fast, someone else will beat them to the punch; Fear that you could decline their initial offer because your asking price isn't totally unreasonable.

By contrast, by pricing your property well above its market value you are simply appealing to your own Greed Factor. Potentially interested Buyers are scared off by the price and immedately look elsewhere. After your property has languished on the market for months and it is finally priced appropriately, there are few left who even notice it and none who would act with any sense of urgency. Net-net, it has taken longer to sell and you are offered a much lower price.

So, talk to me about the dynamics of the market in your area, ask me about comparable sales, and let's discuss the best price at which to market your home - so that we never have to consider what comes next!:

5 Items to Consider Before Dropping the Price

When a house won’t sell, the answer is often to reduce the price, but how much and when?

The following are some items to consider before dropping a home's price:

1. Price the house right to begin with — it will get the most activity when it first goes on the market.

2. Lower the asking price sooner rather than later while it's still fresh in buyers' minds.

3. If there has been no offer in one to two months — six at the most — consider dropping the price, then re-evaluate every two to four weeks.

4. When you drop the price, lower it by enough to make the home the top house in a lower price range rather than the bottom house in a higher range.

5. The more expensive the house, the greater the decrease needs to be to attract new buyers.