How Long Should It Take To Sell My Home?

July 16th, 2007 categories: Homes For Sale in Tampa, Tampa Market Reports, Tampa Real Estate, Tips for Sellers

This is a question we receive from just about any homeowner interested in selling, especially with our current market conditions. And I just spent some time reading a good discussion on the same subject by a group of Realtors.

The point made in this article was that there are some crappy agents out there who, in wanting to move the sales process along, will get their sellers to reduce price instead of being patient and making more of an effort to market the home.

I once heard a very successful agent state that “If it doesn’t sell in 60 days, it’s overpriced.” Is this correct? It really depends on the market and the property, right? If there are no serious buyers in the market for that type of property in those first 2 months, then you can assume that it’s going to take some time to sell. If it’s a median priced home for the area, there may be many buyers in the market at any given time. But if it’s a $5m dollar waterfront contemporary, it may take many months for a serious buyer to enter the market.

So to best answer this question for clients I usually look at how many comparable have sold in the last 6 months and how many are pending. This gives you an indication of demand for the product that you will be bringing to market. I then look at current inventory of comparable properties, which indicates supply.

If similar homes are selling at a rate of 4 per month, and you decide to price near the bottom of the current inventory of active comparables, then you may appeal to the buyers who are in the market currently, and get a quick sale. If you price at the top of the inventory, you may be waiting a while longer in making the other properties look like a better value.

I always compare the real estate market to a retail store in trying to answer the “how long will it take” question. If no one is “in the store” when you price the product and put it on the shelf, you’ll need to wait until the door opens and someone comes in the store. But if there are plenty of people in the store when you put the product out there, you may sell it quickly.

But right now the shelves are full and the store is pretty darn empty. So when you bring your widget out there to display on the shelves, it better be priced so that the few people in the store will see value. If not you’ll have to wait for more customers to come in the door to the store. The doorbell isn’t ringing too often these days. And once you begin the process of mark downs, some customers will sense that no one else wants the thing and they too will pass it over or wait for further reductions.

Granted the this is a simplistic analogy, and the question is not an easy one to answer. But the homework has to be done to find out where to best position the product with respect to pricing. And the quality of the homework, the product itself, the packaging, and supply and demand will help decide the answer to “how long”.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under Homes For Sale in Tampa, Tampa Market Reports, Tampa Real Estate, Tips for Sellers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Enter your email address to get these updates via e-mail:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Leave a Reply

Name

Mail (will not be published)

Website

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Receive an email if someone else comments on this post?

Subscribe without commenting.

Also Noteworthy

How's The Market In Your Neighborhood?