Pricing your home for sale

January 28, 2008

Selling your charleston home To determine pricing your home for sale, real estate agents have always relied on comparable homes sold recently in the market.

In the grand old days of Charleston South Carolina real estate, when homes sold in minutes rather than months, if the seller wanted to sell quickly, pricing would be at the lower end of the recommended range, if time really didn’t matter, the high end of the range would suffice and the home would still sell quickly.

If the sold comps indicated homes selling for $150 per square foot, you would multiply that times the square footage, add another 5% for market conditions heavily favoring sellers during that time and round up to the nearest logical price.

Charleston South Carolina real estate for sale Flash forward to today. There are thousands of homes on the market competing for hundreds of buyers. Prices in the Charleston area have been surprisingly stable during the past year despite soaring inventory.

But thousands of homes go unsold every month. If you are thinking of selling your home in the Charleston area, do you want to sell or just have a for sale sign collecting cobwebs in your yard 6 months from now.

But the prices of sold homes doesn’t really tell the complete story today as much as the prices of other active listings that your home will compete with.

You see, even if the comps based on previously sold homes indicate that your house should sell for $150 per square foot but there are a half dozen homes in your area that are selling from $145 to $148 per square foot, you have to price your home competitively with those houses and slightly lower would be even better.