Selling Your Mesa Home Quickly As Easy As 1-2-3: Step 1

Step 1: Price your Mesa home for the market

Want to know how to sell your Mesa home in today’s real estate market? It’s as easy as 1-2-3.

Step 1: Price your home for the market

Markets are a moving target. Just as anyone with stocks will tell you, a stock’s value will vary from any point in time to the next. The same is true with Mesa real estate; we just don’t have a ticker running at the bottom of your computer monitor to show every sale that occurs.
Accurate pricing is based upon three major factors:

1. Recent sales of similar homes in the surrounding area
2. The trend of sales (are prices rising, falling, or stable)
3. Condition of the property

Please be careful with this one. I know everyone loves their home…I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in “The best house in the neighborhood.” The fact is, most homes are pretty much the same. The maple cabinet “upgrade” the builder sold you was really just a personal choice in taste, not an increase of value to the home and the granite countertops are nice, but they don’t add any measureable value to the price of the home.

In order to appropriately price a home I recommend using pricing windows centered around the pricing trend line. The window is a range of prices that represent the amount a buyer may be willing to pay for a property.

• The top end of the window represents the most that any reasonable buyer in the current market would be willing to pay for a home, or the highest value at which that an appraiser might value the home.
• The bottom end of the window represents the fair market value of the home that would most expedite the sale—a trade-off between time and money.

As time continues and the trend line is updated, the pricing window also needs to be adjusted.

Skeptics might suggest that anyone can sell a property if the price is low enough…and they’d be right. The art is to find the appropriate pricing window based upon current market conditions and seller needs. A seller who has time may opt to try to fully maximize their equity return while a seller who needs to sell now, such as a short sale, will sell at the low edge of the window. Keep in mind a short sale will not be successful below the window since the lien holder will not approve too low of a price.

Of course, pricing is just one variable in the sales equation. Next, we’ll take a look at Step 2: Preparing the Home for Sale.

Casteel Real Estate Professionals | 1255 N Estrada Circle, Mesa, Arizona 85207 | 480-694-0662