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When Your
Selling Price is too High, Beware!
Meeting
With Realtors
So you’ve decided to sell your home
and have a fairly good idea of what you think it is worth. Being a
sensible home seller, you schedule appointments with three local
listing agents who’ve been hanging stuff on your front doorknob for
years. Each Realtor comes prepared with a "Competitive Market
Analysis" on fancy paper and they each recommend a specific sales
price.
Amazingly, a couple of the Realtors have come up with
prices that are lower than you expected. Although they
back up their recommendations with recent sales data of
similar homes, you remain convinced your house is worth
more.
When you
interview the third agent’s figures, they are much more
in line with your own anticipated value, or maybe even
higher. Suddenly, you are a happy and excited home
seller, already counting the money.
A Sales
Practice Called
"Buying a
Listing"
If you’re like many people, you pick
Realtor number three. This is an agent who seems willing to listen to
your input and work with you. This is an agent that cares about
putting the most money in your pocket. This is an agent that is
willing to start out at your price and if you need to drop the price
later, you can do that easily, right?
After all, everyone else
does it!
The truth is that you may have just met
an agent engaging in a questionable sales practice called "buying
a listing." He "bought" the listing by suggesting you
might be able to get a higher sales price than the other agents
recommended. Most likely, he is quite doubtful that your home will
actually sell at that price. The intention from the beginning is to
eventually talk you into lowering the price.
Why do
some agents "buy" listings this way?
There are
basically two reasons. A well-meaning and hard working
agent can feel pressure from a homeowner who has an
inflated perception of his home’s value. On the other
hand, there are some agents who engage in this sales
practice routinely.
copyright 2000 by Terry
Light and RealEstate ABC, revised 2002
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