How Not To Overprice Your House

Whenever selling your house, the biggest mistake you can make is overpricing it. Homebuyers react pretty negatively when it comes to unfair pricing. Not only do they have tons of ways to determine if you’re putting a fair price for your home, but their agent knows that as well.

So by going more than you should, you are potentially losing many buyers. More so, you might not even find a buyer if word spreads. And as we all know, words spread like wildfire in real estate.

So with all that said, here is how not to overprice your home.

Work With Your Agent

The easiest way to prevent making this mistake is to simply hire a real estate agent. Real estate agents know exactly how much money you should ask for your home. While agents aren’t godlike beings that know the answers to these questions based on some higher consciousness, they simply look at similar listings and compare prices. Yep, it’s that easy.

But considering that most sellers don’t have the time to compare prices nor do they know how to do it expertly, going with a real estate agent will help you prevent the mistake. But simply going with an agent doesn’t solve your issue. Instead, you’ll need to actively work with your agent to agree on an amount that you won’t change for the time being. If one particular amount doesn’t work for you, you can explore others.

Be Objective

Whenever discussing pricing, the important thing is to be objective. The real estate market does present an opportunity for you to make more money when selling your home, but it’s all about not going overboard. Home sellers can get more money out of buyers if they sell at the right time. Even so, that doesn’t excuse you to put a hefty price.

If you get this one wrong, you’ll make it much more difficult to attract buyers. And the harder you attract buyers, the harder to get people to compete for your house.

Put Feelings Aside

No doubt the biggest mistake homeowners do is not putting their feelings aside. You might be thinking your home is more than it is, but this is absolutely not true. No other person sees your home the way you do. This is quite normal as they don’t live in your house.

The house might’ve been in your family for generations. Sure you’ve done plenty of remodeling such as replaced the roof, bought new windows, repainted, etc, but it is still your house. Naturally, you might think that being in your family for generations somehow gives your house more value. It might be valuable to you, but buyers have no idea who you are, who your family was, and don’t know a single thing about your history.

What makes your home special to you doesn’t impact buyers at all. What they’re interested in is buying a new home for a fair price.

Check the Internet

We mentioned that people rarely have the time to check local prices. And that’s not really a big problem if you’re going with a real estate agent. But we also mentioned that your agent knows what other people in your neighborhood and wider area price their homes.

Real estate agents get this information from other agents and by looking at listings. And what’s the easiest way to look at listings? Through the internet. If you happened to go FSBO (for sale by owner), then getting access to this information is of utmost importance. This is the only way to prevent an overpricing mistake. When going FSBO, there is no agent involved. So naturally, you’ll need to do things yourself. That’s not to say that going without an agent is the smart way to go, but that you’ll need to do more work to get the information needed.

So, as we said, the easiest way to find out what homes sell for in your neighborhood is to go online and look up listings. This will give you a general idea of the price per square foot and you can compare other homes with yours to get the right price. Even if you don’t go with an agent, you can always order a real estate appraisal to help you out.

Finishing Thoughts

Overpricing your house is a mistake to avoid. There is no telling how this decision will reflect your ability to sell your house, but it will certainly play a huge role. There are many ways how we can get the right evaluation for our homes. From tasking our real estate agent to get the information to looking it up ourselves, it’s important to know that there are tons of options out there. But we shouldn’t also forget to remove our emotions from the whole process. No matter how special you feel your house is to you, potential buyers do not share this opinion.