Note to Jacksonville Florida Home Sellers, Get Real On Pricing Your Home
We have been brutally honest with 3 Jacksonville Florida home sellers this week about what their home is worth. All of these home sellers wanted more than current market value for their home for various reasons.
A majority of Realtors we know in Northeast Florida would have taken their homes at the price the seller thought their house was worth without bringing the sellers into reality. We know this for a fact because the Home Sellers showed us the market analysis done by other agents for their home. These analysis either didn’t show any detail on how the Realtor arrived at their listing price or used sold comparables that were from the time of the Sellers Market and not today. That is not how we work at Phyllis Frankel Realty Group. Not pricing your Jacksonville Florida home correctly is one of the biggest seller mistakes you can make in this buyers market.
How To Set Your Listing Price
In this Buyers market you have to be competitively priced to sell your home. Your marketing price should be derived from an analysis of current competitive homes on the market and recent sales. The current state of the market should also be taken into account. We prepare a spreadsheet and provide you with detailed information and color photos of all of the comparable homes we use in our analysis. We also provide you with the 2 year trend of what has been happening in the overall market for your home. You can visual see with these tables and charts what is happening in your real estate market. This way you can review every detail for yourself and come to the same conclusion that we have. Unfortunately, there may be many reasons why you feel your home is worth more but those reasons will not get your home sold.
Items That Don’t Effect Real Estate Pricing
Here are three separate reasons given to us by the home sellers this week on why they should get the higher listing price:
“I Took Out An Equity Loan And Need The Sales Price To Pay It Off”
First congratulate yourself for great timing. You could not take out that equity loan today with the new strict qualifying guidelines for mortgages. Hopefully you used that money to payoff higher interest rate loans or bought an appreciating/money making asset with those funds.
Now let us come back to today. Home Buyers are not going to pay you more for your home just because you need more. Buyers have access to the details about all the otherhomes for sale in your Jacksonville Florida neighborhood. Furthermore, they can see through Realtor’s websites the interior of your home and the interior of the other homes for sale and compare the two without even stepping inside. They are not going to waste their time looking at your home that is $50,000 more then your neighbors.
Example of Seeing Homes For Sale in Your Neighborhood
Search By Neighborhood Name
If you know the name of your Duval County Neighborhood or St. Johns County Neighborhood then you can either enter it into the search box which is located in the top right hand corner on every page of my website or perform a Jacksonville subdivision real estate search through the IDX page. Just click on the neighborhood in the results and you will see everything for sale. Click on the map icon at the top of the search results and you can see them on a map.
Search By Our Nifty Real Estate Mapping Tool
Click here to see a map showing everything for sale in your Jacksonville Florida neighborhood. You can search by the criteria at the top of the page or do what I like to do and go to the bottom left corner of the map and enter in the address of the property by the magnifying glass and click enter.
So this Home Seller either needs to figure out a way to payoff the equity loan at the time of closing or wait until the market value can cover your loans in order to put your home back on the market. Don’t waste your time or the Realtor’s time and advertising dollar when you know the sale isn’t going to happen. Instead concentrate on the bright side of things and be happy that the prime equity rates just came down so your equity loan is costing you less!
“I Did Upgrades In My Home That The Other Home Doesn’t Have.”
We told the Home Seller that their home needs to be priced below a competitive home down the street that has more attractive features. The other home backs to a preserve and has a 3 Car Garage while the Home Seller we were talking to backs to the main street and only has a 2 Car Garage.
Home features that you can’t change or are very expensive to change are valued more by Home Buyers. This is the advice we give home buyers when buying New Construction in Jacksonville Florida. Do or add on what you can’t do later because it’s impossible or too expensive. Upgrades such as moldings, upgraded paint, upgraded flooring, light fixtures, etc can all be added in the future.
You can not change your lots location. You may be able to add a 3rd car bay to your garage but it requires the room on your lot and potentially re-doing the front of your home to ensure that the front of the home is still appealing. So when the Home Seller with poor lot and 2 car garages wants more than the other because they added hardwood floors … it just didn’t add up. The homeowner down the street with the 3 car garage and superior lot can always add the wood floors, but our Seller couldn’t change his less lot location or fit a 3rd car bay.
“A Similar Condo Sold For This Much Last Year”
We all wish we had time machines and that we could go back in time and sell our property at the top of the market. But Buyers are going to be looking at the prices today. Furthermore, appraisers are going to be looking at recent sales and not those high flying prices of last year. So even if you could get your price, the buyer still won’t be able to get financing if the recent sales are lower. So look at today’s home prices and decide if the time to sell is right.
Selling your home is an emotional and stressful time for the home seller. You want to know you are making the right decision. You want everything to go smoothly so that you can concentrate on moving your family. That is why you need to bring a Realtor. Not only do we give you an objective opinion and handle all the details for you; but we help you take the emotions out the decisions and look at the home selling process from the Buyer’s view point.
You Can't See Reality When It's Happening To You
I am sure that these Home Sellers would of saw the situation as we did if they had read about the situation in a magazine. But it was happening to them and they couldn’t see past their situation to see how Buyers would view their home.
We will be contacting them in a day or so to see if they will accept the realities of the current real estate market. Chances are we lost their real estate business because we were honest. But as every good real estate agent knows that if they are priced too high for the market they will contact us again in 6 months to talk about selling their house again.
Posted by Carey Frankel on
Leave A Comment