The Comparable Market Analysis
Before listing your home for sale, we need to determine an accurate market value. To accomplish that, I’ll prepare a thorough Comparable Market Analysis (CMA), which will help us determine a likely range that you home should sell for.
In the analysis, we’ll look at homes similar to yours, which have:
- Recently sold
- Are currently under contract
- Are currently active on the market
This will also help us determine an appropriate price to list your house for against the current competition, and considering (at minimum) its size, age, location, features, and the current market activity.
I’ll give you my objective perspective and advice as to how much you should list your house for. While I hope you take my advice, ultimately you decide on the list price for your house.
However, the buyers in the market ultimately determine the market value of your home. It is only worth what a ready, willing, and able buyer is willing to pay. That should be in line with the value we see in the CMA, as long as there are no major changes within the market, and you make the right decisions on pricing right from the start.
Many homeowners tend to overprice their house when they first hit the market because:
- They believe they should have “wiggle room” to be able to negotiate to the price they want to get.
- They simply hope that someone will pay more than the market data indicates.
- They price it based upon what they “need to get” in order to sell their house.
- They add every dollar of improvements they have made to the house over the years onto the data-driven value.
When a seller overprices their home, for any of these reasons, they usually lose the market’s interest by being out of line with the market. This causes their home to sit, accrue days on market, and cause buyers to conclude there’s something wrong with the house, it’s overpriced, or both. Stale listings do not sell for asking price, and the longer the home sits on the market, buyers will be expecting price reductions or submit low offers.
So, before we even go over the market analysis, my best advice is to listen to the data and price your home accordingly. That’ll end up saving you a lot of time, money, and aggravation.
