Pricing Your Home To Sell

Welcome!

Pricing your home for the market is the most important component of listing and selling your home.

Gott Realty is proud to provide honest, transparent real estate agent representation when it comes to selling your North Brisbane property.

Here you’ll find all the info you need for pricing your home for sale, including:

1. What influences a home’s sale price
2. How to get into the buyer’s mindset
3. Position, Presentation and Price
4. Pricing Zones
5. Pricing Terms and Methods – The good, bad and ugly
6. Pricing Apps and Portals
7. How Gott Realty can help you

What influences a home's sale price?

There are many factors that can influence the price of a home including:

• The world, national, state and local economies.
• Council final certificates, potential drugs labs in rental properties, deaths that may have taken place on the property.
• Presence of asbestos walls and internal roof lining or fencing.
• Location of your suburb, your street, overhead power lines, proximity to major roads and train lines, or adjacent industrial estates.
• Accessibility to public transport, sporting facilities, schools, shopping facilities.
• Availability of finance.
• External and internal presentation, real estate agents, registered valuers, banks.
• Number of potential buyers in the market.
• Neighbours, friends and family and you yourself.

Ultimately though, the sale price will come down to you, the buyer and negotiation skills of the real estate agent you engage.

So, where do you begin pricing your home?

“While we all have high expectations of the sale price we hope to achieve, my number one piece of advice is to place yourself in the buyer’s shoes for a short time before you even think of a starting price.

It pays to invest a little bit of time to objectively view your property through the eyes of potential buyer’s to help set appropriate expectations around price and current market value.”

How to get into the buyer's mindset

Your buyer will do their research before buying a home, just as you would. They search the internet portals such

as onthehouse.com.au to see how much your home is worth and look at realestate.com.au and domain.com.au to check on sold prices of other homes and new listings hitting the market.

They attend open homes, they look in adjoining suburbs to check if a comparable property are available and cheaper, they check out the street and neighbours in the early evening for noisy neighbours and untidy yards.

By going through this process over a 3-4-month period while searching for a home, buyer’s build up a very good gauge of what is over-priced and what is in-line with current market value. It’s the same approach you’ll likely take once you’ve sold and you become a buyer.

Is your home competitive with others on the market?

Position, Presentation and Price is the catchcry of real estate. And ultimately these three words determine the sale price you will receive.

POSITION

This refers to the physical location of the property and is outside of your control, so focus your attention on Presentation and Price.

PRESENTATION

Not sure how to present your home for sale? Download our FREE E-BOOK “101 WAYS TO PREPARE YOUR HOME FOR THE MARKET”.

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PRICE

This refers to the initial pricing strategy employed.

Pricing Zones

If you want to generate the best price come sale time, you need to be aware off the pitfalls of over-pricing or under-pricing when you first list your home.

Over-Pricing

• You can lose $20,000 – $40,000 by overpricing your property
• Typically leads to you having to heavily discount the price of the home
• A lack of buyer interest after 14 days tells you the home is overpriced

“80% of real estate agents believe pricing too high is the worst mistake a vendor can make selling their home”.

Source: 2018 survey of real estate agents conducted by Real Estate Business (REB).

Market Pricing

• Price is based on similar properties to yours that have sold in the last 90 days.
• The REIQ recommends that you seek the opinion of at least three agencies to provide you with a CMA (Competitive Market Analysis).
• You want to attract genuine buyers to your home and, hopefully, multiple offers.

EXPERT TIP: Remove the rose-coloured glasses including emotion and advice from friends or family to set a market price. Remember, very few buyers see a home through the same lens as the property owner.

Under-Pricing

• Occurs when you are inundated with buyers and numerous offers when you hit the market.
• Sellers often use terminology along the lines of “gave it away”.

For more in-depth analysis and real-life case studies on the three pricing zones, we strongly suggest you read our “Pricing Your Home” blog here.

Learn more about the three Pricing Zones here

Pricing Apps and Portals

The major real estate portals and some banks are now advertising their property pricing apps.

For example, the ANZ app is excellent at providing in-depth information about the estimated price of a home and statistics of the suburb, plus so much more. Similarly, property information portal onthehouse.com.au. This portal collects public information about property and makes it available to banks; real estate agents; solicitors or anyone who is willing to pay for it.

Increasingly, buyers are being influenced by the data provided in these apps and portals when making offers or negotiating.

And while they can be beneficial, sellers should be wary that buyers may avoid certain properties when the price displayed in the real estate agent’s ad is far higher than the price suggested by the app.

For a seller and real estate agent, it can be very hard to negotiate a higher selling price than what is displayed by the app, reiterating the important of pricing your property in the correct selling zone.

Pricing Terms and Methods

Fixed Price

Fixed pricing is the most traditional pricing method in Australia. How it works is that the seller decides on a price (eg: $525,000) as the maximum asking price. The property is placed on the market at this price.

Proven to be very successful in Australia, but the biggest risk is over-pricing.

Offers Over

Offers over is a relatively new pricing method. It was introduced about 20 years ago and is commonly used by agents. One way to describe it as an “each way” bet to pricing.

Be wary of real estate agents over-selling and under-delivering with this pricing method. Almost 50% of homes sold go for less than the listed “Offers Only” price.

Fake Pricing Methods

Fake pricing methods include:

• Off market sale
• Price on Application (POA)
• By Negotiation
• For Sale Now
• Express Sale
• Inviting All Offers
• Mid $400,000s

Our data shows that the 90% of buyers don’t look at properties using these pricing methods, so you’re essentially reducing your buyer’s market to only 10%. Plus, if the property hasn’t sold within the first few weeks, you tend to revert to a “fixed price” or “offers only” strategy.

Auctions

Auctioning a property is a century old tried and proven method of selling almost anything.

In our opinion, careful consideration should be given to whether it’s right for your home. It tends to work well for inner-city dwellings where buyer and seller demographics are different, rather than North Brisbane homes.

Be wary of “fake auctions” when the property is advertised for a few weeks without setting an auction date or time; only to then revert to a fixed price. Typically used by novice real estate agents, the property can quickly become stale and appear lower in online property listings impacting buyer interest.

Tender

Typically reserved for Commercial and Industrial real estate when a gross or net rental figure is available to the buyer.

From time-to-time a residential real estate agent may suggest it. We advise against this as success via this method is difficult.

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Why choose Gott Realty?

Transparency

Transparency is all about being open and honest with all aspects of the sale process. This includes:

• an accurate Competitive Market Analysis (CMA);
• providing the the best advertising campaign for your home and associated costs;
• being upfront about how the agency negotiates with buyers on your behalf;
• to advising a suitable sale price strategy for you;
• plus how it will handle offers and multiple offers.

Marketing Experience

We have 40 years of real estate marketing experience. We are the most experienced and technology advanced real estate agents in the North Brisbane area.

Gone are the days of simply taking a few pics for the real estate office window and writing an ad. To ensure your property is exposed to the maximum number of buyers, your agent should:

• be across the major property and real estate portals and social media;
• have an in-depth knowledge of still, 3D, aerial drone and twilight photography plus videography;
• create a polished, individualised buyer handout brochure.

Here at Gott Realty we only use and recommend Top Tier Advertising and Marketing Campaigns personalised for your property to maximise buyer interest.

Negotiation Skills

One of the most important skills a real estate agent should possess is the ability to successfully negotiate on behalf of the vendor. Unfortunately, it’s not a skill that can be easily learned, or taught by Principals or training courses. Consequently many salespeople have very limited skills.

Negotiation is not about receiving an offer from a buyer and presenting it to the vendor for consideration, rather:

• negotiation involves knowing the buyer and their position;
• looking after the best interests of the seller.
• the agent operating with total transparency so that both parties have confidence in the procedures taking place.

At Gott Realty, our negotiation process has total transparency so that you the seller know exactly what the buyers are offering, and we will advise the best strategy to take.