Great Chance To Sell Your House - Don't Blow It!

Winter will be departing soon and the seasonal changes that are approaching always stimulate the Tallahassee housing market. If you need to sell your home, you have a great chance now, so don't blow it!

For you to realize success in selling a home, you have to be knowledgeable on how to determine the home value range. This is so critical that I suspect that is the top reason that most people fail to sell a home in Tallahassee (and most other markets as well).  So how hard is it to sell a home right now?

The current one-year trend of the home selling success rate has risen to 46%, but I fear that number will peak soon and then begin to drop. Now remember, the one-year trend is not affected by seasonality, as each point in the graph (blue field below) represents 365 days worth of home sales in Tallahassee.

A 46% sales success rate means less than 1/2 of all homes for sale in Tallahassee are selling. In the real estate graph below, you can see that number actually dipped down to 1 in 3 homes selling in the spring of last year. Do you want to be part of the 60+% that are not going to sell? I hope not ...

Home Sales Success Rate Should Begin To Fall

The home sales success rate is measured by dividing the total number of listings taken over the past 365 days and dividing that by the total number of home sales during the same period. This gives us a relative snap shot of the difficulty (or ease) of selling a home.

Unfortunately for homeowners who need to sell, a really bad economy combined with a weak housing market are conspiring to make it more difficult to sell a home. Inventory is going to be emerging from the shadow inventory of homes in Tallahassee, creating more competition than most homeowners will be able to handle.

Knowing what is ahead of us is the one competitive advantage that homeowners have today that can help them be successful in selling their home. The key is to use this information and take decisive action.

New Competition Will Make The Same Old Mistakes

If you are ready to sell your home now, you can get it done in 60 days or less if you make some wise decisions. You need to work with an expert at determining real estate values and your initial market position, and you need to make sure that your home is exposed to the largest market segment that is most likely to find your home attractive.

Fortunately, your competition will not do this. They will make the same mistakes that others made last year (remember, less than 40% of homes listed last year actually sold) and spend their first few months on the market just flailing around. If you make the right decisions early, you can beat them to the seasonal buyers that are arriving daily.

We know that real estate values are dropping, so the homeowners who act wisely now will reap the benefits, while those who do not, will be forced to sell their home in a market with fewer buyers and more homes on the market.

How To Price Your Home To Sell

The key to pricing your home to sell is in understanding the home value range in which your home will sell. As we have covered in the past, you will need to distinguish between the following definitions of value:

• Value is what the property is worth to someone. If you have all the time in the world to sell your home, than maybe you try to find that one home buyer who will appreciate all of the finer benefits that your home offers. Unfortunately, with home values dropping in Tallahassee, I suspect that you really do not have "all the time in the world."
• Market Value is a price range that appeals to many buyers and causes a sale to occur within a reasonable time frame. This is the value that serious home sellers should be seeking from their real estate broker.
• Quick Sale Value is a price range that will create demand where little exists due to the extremely low price of the property. This is like an absolute auction, where bidders appear hoping to "steal" the property. A quick sale value often times sparks the additional interest in the property which propels its sale to a price much higher than the initial quick sale value.

Sell a Home In Today's Real Estate Market

The key to selling your home is to remember that price is only one piece of the marketing plan. A really great plan, with a not-so-great price will not yield results in today's competitive housing market. Also, a great price with a not-so-great marketing plan can still result in a home sale, but most likely for less money than the homeowner would have realized with an outstanding marketing plan.