The Best Thing You Can Do to Sell Your House

Here’s a piece from MSN Money that details the psychology of buying a home. The piece contains some very interesting insights into how to best sell a home. For instance, consider this:

You’re selling your home. Here’s the big decision: Should you set the price high, expecting buyers will bargain you down eventually? Or should you start low to attract a lot of attention and get the inevitable discounting over with upfront?

This is a classic scenario, right? Since people have been selling homes they’ve faced the “price high and drop later” or “price aggressively” decision/trade-off. And almost everyone I’ve known (including me) has done the former. Wrong move. Here’s why:

Experts agree that starting high with the idea that you can always drop it later is a costly mistake. Pricing doesn’t just determine how much money you stand to make — it also dictates whether buyers even give your home a serious look.

With so many competing properties for sale, yours has to pop out immediately as a good value or buyers will move on, unlikely to return. You get one first shot at your home’s debut, and it’s easy to blow it.

“The amount of traffic that a listing gets in its first week is five to seven times what it gets in its ensuing weeks,” says Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage and listings site. “Let’s say you lower the price (later). No one will notice. You really are broadcasting that discount to a much smaller audience of buyers and will have the perception it is damaged goods.”

The conclusion here is that you need to price you home correctly from the get-go