HOME-SELLERS SHOULD CHANGE THEIR TACTICS
In conditions of slowing real-estate market with such a large home inventories and decline in buyers’ demand home-sellers should get rid of habitual steps while selling their homes which they used during housing boom. Today it has become much more difficult to attract buyers and implement a good profitable deal, since in conditions of good choice homebuyers can afford to be choosy and fastidious. Thus it takes much more time to sell your home today.
Thanks to all the mentioned above today’s sellers are forced to lower their home-prices if they want to speed a sale and sometimes they have to sell their homes half a price they wanted.
If some months before those who intended to sell a house could set a price just looking at the prices of nearby houses for sale or local listings now they must be savvier to market trends. Before putting their home on the market and charging price home-sellers should investigate local market more carefully, they should study buyers’ preferences and which prices they regard as acceptable and attractive, homeowners also need to learn local asking prices by looking through local papers or real-estate publications. Some real-estate agents, like Kayser Dixon from Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy in New York, counsel home-sellers to visit area open houses to evaluate competition. “If you look at a price on a piece of paper, it doesn’t do anything for you,” he says.
Homeowners should be very prudent today when setting a price so that they didn’t overpriced their homes and scared away potential buyers. Buyers have a greater number of homes to choose due to the growing number of property on the real-estate market. Real-estate agents suggest to fix price just below than the market can bear. Thus Rob Gross, a senior vice president with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, for a $1 million home in Manhattan asks for $995,000 to “get traffic”.
Nowadays homeowners can’t establish housing-boom prices any more. And if your neighbor got $1 million for the house like yours at the time of housing boom that doesn’t mean that you can ask $1 million for your home even though you regard it as similar or better one. Everything is changing and market conditions are also changing. Yet yesterday you could snatch a large sum for your property but today you can barely be thankful for small mercies. Thus homeowners must determine a price in accordance with the existing market prices at present that they can learn from their real-estate agents or online search, instead of looking at the gains received by their neighbors recently.
For attracting buyers and carrying out a deal it is not enough just to inform your real-estate agent about your intention of selling a home. I think that under the current competitive environment which is turned out at present market homeowners should draw everyone they can to imagine in the process of selling a home: they should email a property brochure to real-estate investment groups, encourage friends and relatives to talk up their house to anyone interested in purchasing a property, etc. It is advisable also to stipulate with your real-estate agent for possibility of commission discount in case of finding a buyer on your own.
I suppose homeowners should take into account further lowering in home-prices at many real-estate markets. Thus they must understand that the longer they sell their house, the more money they lose. They should be enterprising and prompt while making up their mind especially when the offer seems good enough. But they shouldn’t be too quick to turn down an offer if it doesn’t seem alluring enough, because in conditions of the housing market downward trends making a deal now, instead of later, can save them money in the end.
I think also that today’s home-sellers must be more flexible and pliable while negotiating with buyers since it is obvious that buyers are at the heard of the market today. Homeowners should offer concessions to buyers if they want to find and hold them.
One more thing that can help homeowners to hasten a sale and to enhance a chance of arranging lucrative bargain, in my opinion, is spending some time and money on heightening attractiveness of their homes. For instance, they can do minor repairs, clean out closets and garage, get rid of all the old needless things (which they can send to storage, donate it to charity or have a garage sale). All these arrangements will make a house more appealing and make it look bigger. It is also expedient to make a landscape. But real-estate agents suggest not to do too much expenditure and to use the cheapest things you will be able to find.
In order to save some amount of money home-sellers can apply to a discount broker instead of addressing to traditional real-estate agents. Discount brokers offer fewer services but charge a reduced commission.
Thus I’d like to conclude that as any other markets real-estate market has its fluctuations when firstly sellers are at the heard and determine rules and then another cycle ensues and the supremacy passes into the hands of buyers. The latter is featured for the current market, when homeowners must do their best to negotiate a deal but there are a lot of ways for this, offered by specialists and partly described in this post.