Selling Home?
If you are a prospective seller, you want to discover the value of your home so you can make a fair selling price for your property when you put it out into the market. If you have a low valued home, you may change the cost of the home or make more improvements in order to increase the value.
Appraisal report helps the seller determine a reasonable asking price that isn't too high or too low. Trying to set a listing price is often an anxiety-ridden part of the home selling process, so getting some neutral, well-informed help with this task will lift a lot of weight from a seller's shoulders.
Pricing your home correctly is absolutely vital if you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to sell your house and maximize your profit.
Obviously pricing your home too low is going to take money out of your pocket and you don't want that. But what you have to realize that this is a definite possibility when relying solely on a real estate agent's opinion, because after all, they don't get paid unless your home gets sold (and the quicker the better). And if you think that just because they work on commission, they will fight to get you "top-dollar," think again. Their motivation may not be as transparent as you think. Let me explain by showing you a couple of hypothetical examples.
Scenario A: Your house sells for $500,000. With a typical commission agreement of 5%, the commission paid to the real estate agent is $25,000. But the listing agent's office usually only gets half of that - so, $12,500 goes to the listing agent's office and the other $12,500 goes to the office of the agent that brought the buyer to the house. Further, your listing agent usually only gets about half of the money that was paid to his or her office (the rest goes to the broker that runs the office). So that leaves him or her with about $6,250 or 1.25% of the actual selling price of your home.
Scenario B: The same house sells for $520,000...$20,000 more than in the first scenario. And we've already established that your listing agent will likely only end up with about 1.25% of that $520,000, which is a total of $6,500.Yes, that's right, in this scenario the listing agent will only end up making about an extra $250 for getting you an extra $20,000!
That's not much of an incentive to fight for "top dollar" for your home. It's much easier and safer for them to price your house for less than it's worth in order to make sure it gets sold and ensure they make a commission. The bottom line, although real estate agents do work on commission it's really not in their best interest to fight for "top dollar."
If you listed your home too high, an overpriced home does not attract buyers. And a house that sits on the market too long becomes "stigmatized" and becomes much harder to sell. It's human nature really, the longer a house sits unsold, the more people begin to think that there's something wrong with it. The end result is that you have to keep lowering your price until it's viewed as a bargain and can finally attract buyers.
Please call us today at (347) 878-8686 to speak to one of our experienced, licensed appraisers. We will gladly answer all of your questions and help you schedule an appointment time that is convenient for you.