It's just this simple, the longer your home is on the market the more likely the prices will drop. My goal, when listing a home, is to market hard and heavy seeking enough activity to hopefully create multiple offers.
Multiple offers causes home prices to rise.
I will share two personal examples of homes Kathleen and I owned. You probably have your own good or not so good story.
Story 1: Immediately after listing our home we had a low ball and actually offensive offer. The buyers agent, I was an agent too, came with ridiculous comparable's to try and drive the price down. We sent him packing.
Within the first week on the market multiple offers started coming in. Knowing this we wanted our price. We offered counter offers at full price. Eventually the original buyer, the agent for that buyer, came in with an offer above our listing price. We had so many choices we chose a buyer with a different agent. We were happy, the original buyers were not. Our home was terrific and they tried to get back in the game above our asking price but were too late. There are multiple lessons here. The one I point out is multiple offers cause prices to rise.
Story 2: I have seen this happen so many times, and here it happened to us. It was a Saturday and we found a model home in a development we found exciting. While going through the home others were there also. For about a year this had been the model and that Saturday it went on the market. Realizing we weren't going to be the only buyers we quickly submitted a full price offer. To make it strong I included documentation that I was the President and CEO of one of the largest mortgage companies in our state. I did everything I could to assure the seller he was safe committing to us. This included proof we were making a large down payment with the purchase.
Monday I received a call from the listing agent. He informed us that his seller wanted to choose us, we were strong buyers and we were the first offer in. The catch however was that the others were also full price and we could have the deal if we upped the purchase price by $5,000.00. Again, there are multiple lessons here, but the big one is that multiple offers drive prices up.
I have seen homes sold only after going through two listing agents, one of the homes was on the market for a combined 9 months. One ended up selling for $50,000 below it's $290,000 asking price. That home was vacant, and presented in an awful manner to begin with. The second time around wasn't awful, but it was bleak.
Marketing a home takes a professional approach: great photos, great home presentation, and a full out marketing assault. That is what I do, with the help of my partner and wife Kathleen. Kathleen is an excellent photographer. She has been an award winning interior designer. She has been the lead designer on many multi-million dollar homes. She has won several best of home shows awards in Street of Dreams competitions. She has had homes published in magazines.
She is an important part of the marketing package I offer.
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