We can sell your home for up to 18% more money. We’ll prove it to you.
How can you sell your home for up to 18% more money? It sounds like a bold claim, but I’ll prove to you that we can do it for you by walking you through the third part of our five-part process.
Last time, we talked about presenting your home to market and how we showcase your home using photo, video, and other cool technologies like Matterport. Once the home has been prepared and we’ve presented it to market, it’s now all about pricing.
Pricing is as much of an art as it is a science, and its extremely critical when it comes to getting the most money when selling your home. One of the strategies we like to use here at Brett Jennings Real Estate Experts is getting an appraisal done on the property. We find that if we use a professional appraiser, we can give that appraiser quote guidance to get us the most favorable value for your home. We can also use that appraisal to influence buyers to pay top dollar for your home. Here’s how that works.
For example, take the home we sold at Mountain View (pictured at 1:24 in the video). We first asked the local experts in the neighborhood who’d sold more homes in that particular zip code what they thought the value of this property would sell for when we brought it to market.
The agent said that it was worth about $1.35 million. We then got our appraiser to give us a generous appraisal on the property, which came in at about $1.42 million. After that, we priced the property at around $1.299 million less than the agent’s survey.
“Pricing is as much of an art as it is a science.”
Then, we included a copy of the appraisal in the disclosure package and on the agent comments on the MLS. We set a deadline of 10 days, because one weekend might not be enough to maximize the exposure for buyers. Also, by setting a deadline, we effectively forced buyers to compete. We ended up with seven offers, ranging from about $1.35 million up to $1.43 million, which was $10,000 over our appraised value.
We negotiated the top two offers against one another, eventually getting them up to $1.465 million. We actually got $115,000, or 18% more, in the sale of this home by using an appraisal strategically.
The reason that this works is that when buyers are faced with competition in a low-inventory market like ours, they’ll ask their agents what they need to offer in order to get the house. The agent, in most instances, has a printout from the MLS showing home values in that neighborhood; it could be a $150,000 swing in our favor. It really becomes a conversation about what the buyers are comfortable offering.
We found by having a pre-appraisal in our disclosure package, the agent is also going to reference the appraisal when consulting the buyers, advising them to offer at least the appraised value. Doing just that, we’ve gotten as much as 8% more than the average market value.
If you have any questions about pricing, using an appraisal strategically, or selling your home, feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to tell you more about our winning strategy.