The Best Thing You Can Do to Sell Your House

. They state this more clearly a little later in the piece as follows:

Your job as a seller seems simple: Price it right to make the sale.

Identify your home’s true value, and set the price slightly under that. At worst, you’ll lose about $10,000, but you might make a quick sale. If you’re further under market than that, buyers are likely to bid the price back up, Kelman says.

An error on the high side, however, can cost you more than just time. Once you drop your price, buyers smell blood. “They say, ‘He’s knocked $30k off the price; he’ll do it again.’ It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Kelman says.

As I said, I’ve done the “price it high and drop as needed” strategy myself and it’s almost never worked out well. The one time it did was when we were in a seller’s market in a highly attractive town and development.

I know this is accurate from a buyer’s standpoint as well. When we were looking at homes, if something was priced too high I knew it and sometimes didn’t even so see the home (sometimes I would, but I went knowing that they would need to come down $50k to be in line with the market.) Of course our agent was always telling me why the price was a good one as is. Yeah, right. I quickly got tired of that and started discounting her opinion. She was there to get me to buy at any price (even if it was a bad deal for me) and that’s that.

When we had our home on the market for a month or so two years ago, my wife and I had a “discussion” about pricing. She wanted to go high and drop the price later. I wanted to go low and sell quickly. We ended up with a middle-of-the-road price that didn’t get much traffic in to see the place. It didn’t really matter since the home purchase we were going to make fell through, but the experience did reinforce what the author is saying in this piece.

So to conclude: pricing your home correctly (and if you error, do so on the low side) is the single-best way to see it quickly. Seems like common sense, but in reality it’s not applied that often.