Realtor Questions

[SossMan]

[ QUOTE ]
krishan,

You can do this . You can set commission % to whatever you like. Flat bonus is fine as well. Many builders do this (~.5-1% bonus on price of home). If the agent is a family friend tell her to keep the price the same and move it to 3(for her)/4(for buyer broker). Ship it.

[/ QUOTE ]

it's sad, but I know realtors who will only show certain buyers (the less internet savvy ones) 4% listings.
Your house will get a lot more traffic.

[Thremp]

SossMan,

Very true and unethical IMO. However, if I was an agent and from what I gathered in Krishan's post... I'd push them to put an offer in on his home more than someone else's, even if it was slightly low.

Also, the price reductions and long time on market and not selling may have people wonder if theres something wrong with the home rather than it just being overpriced for that period. Neither here nor there, but just happens.

[ayamaguc]

[ QUOTE ]
We put our house on the market at 228,000 which was probably a little optimistic but we had time on our side. In June we decide to reduce the price since we hadn't seen many people interested. We reduce to 224 which puts us at a nice price point relative to other houses (still I think too high). In august with 3 months to go we further reduce to 214.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have no idea about the local dynamics of your housing market. No time right now to check. That said, your stepdown from 228k to 224k is nothing. It's noise. Maybe you'd make this concession to a hooked buyer as a makeup for something they don't like. But this is < 2% right? And how long was the house on the market before that?

Your 10k adjustment is more like it, but again, how long had you been at that pricepoint? How had the market changed while you were sitting? Are your neighbors now offering free cars and vacations to get people to buy? Are homebuilders putting up houses and selling them at 70% of construction cost just to get the land off the books? Etc.

Who's under pressure:
-the guy with an empty house/extra mortgage looking to sell?
-or the guy with a pile of cash needing a place to live?

It sounds like you're chasing the market down. Maybe 214k would've gotten it done in March. Maybe not. But if you didn't get action then, you were behind the curve. If you didn't get action after your cuts, you never caught up to the market.

Ultimately your notions of price, what's optimistic, comps, etc. are irrelevant. Comps. are about what happened. Sales are about today and forward. The buyer sets the market price. You choose whether to accept or not.

If carrying costs aren't a problem, you have more options like looking to rent, seller financing, etc. If costs are a problem, get aggressive. Put together a plan. Prep the house and get it on the market. Push it aggressively, and start rolling price back.

What if you dropped 5k/week off the price? Or 5k every two weeks? And made that part of your push? Would that drum up attention? Do you have an 'I can't take this hold the line' number?

[Thremp]

aya,

The intention of that plan is good, but the actual plan sucks.

[z28dreams]

Who was it that mentioned DC area?

It dropped about 3%, but seems to have leveled out. People I've talked to seem actually BULLISH about spring.

What makes people believe this spring will see a bigger drop in prices?

[morphd]

Z28, don't believe the realtor hype, do some research, google housing bubble, lots of good info out there. Inventory is going to skyrocket in spring and prices will come down.

DC area in particular should see some big drops but of course nothing is guaranteed. If you're planning on buying, do yourself a service and get some info. not provided by a realtor organization so you can make an informed decision.

[ayamaguc]

[ QUOTE ]
aya, The intention of that plan is good, but the actual plan sucks.

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Would you care to suggest an alternative? The OP hasn't indicated if he's in a place where he can carry the property empty forever, where he can try to rent and carry a loss for a while, where he must sell the property ASAP b/c the carry and lost opportunities are killing him, or somewhere in between. But you must have an idea, right?

This could be a realtor/marketing/presentation problem, but I'm going to guess it's a pricing problem. Buyers can see what's happening. It doesn't hurt them much to wait, and some of them smell blood. Having a long timeframe (say, 10 months to sell) doesn't mean you'll get your price. Sellers don't like the prices they're seeing, so they pull their houses off the market. Something of a staredown going on until someone blinks.

[Thremp]

Aya,

Pay the salesperson more for starters, assuming he gets his how to a avg price. When you get in the habit of taking bucks off each week. People are gonna hold until they can get a deal. This might mean taking 95c on the dollar or even 90c with your plan. By pricing it at market rates and giving the agent an incentive to push your home over others it'll outweigh the fact that its DOM looks very poor. Worst case he'll get some lowball offers.

[ayamaguc]

That's a good point. Once you get the interest, you have room to maneuver.

That said, this seems like a demand discovery problem, which reverse auction can address.

[jaydub]

z28,

I did. I believe spring will be brutal for a great number of reasons, one of which is a 100%+ increase in home prices while most zips have experienced an inflation adjusted decrease in household income. I say most because Great Falls in particular has increased income by a double digit percent (big shocker there).

thremp,

1. You are consistently giving too much credit to the realtor's ability to move a house.

2. You seem to misunderstand the definition of market price. It is what the buyer is willing to pay and the seller is willing to sell at.

3. OP has already cost himself several percent as aya correctly points out.

J