One of the most common mistakes made by people selling a home is with the pricing. Every person with a home for sale wants the most money possible. However, there is such as thing as pricing yourself right out of the market. What happens is that if you were to price your home at the top of the price range, if your home does not sell within two weeks, it quickly becomes old news. That means real estate agents begin bypassing your home to show because there are recent listings. For potential buyers, as the home does not sell, they begin to question why.
In addition to pricing yourself out of a sell, overpricing also means carrying costs, which over time will begin to eat up your equity. Let us say you had your home on the market for $150,000. While a fair price, 10 other similar homes are listed within a five-mile radius with the highest priced home being $145,000. Now, you have since moved to your new home, meaning you are paying the new mortgage, as well as the monthly payment on the unsold home. Within months, those extra payments will start to deplete any money built up in the home, not to mention the stress of carrying two mortgages.
In addition to losing equity, having an unsold home also means spending money to
keep the electricity one, temperatures set comfortably within the home, property taxes, time to keep the home maintained, and so on. The good news is that this type of situation can be avoided, simply by not overpricing the home in the first place. In other words, even if you were to market your home for $140,000 to $145,000, you need to weigh the loss compared to what it would cost you just to be sitting on an empty home.
The bottom line is that having an unsold home could cost you a fortune, which defeats the purpose in the first place of pricing it high. Although you might be interested in selling the home as a FSBO, if you need to get a good price but also sell your home quickly, it might be worth the investment of hiring a professional real estate agent. This individual will do all the necessary work to determine how you should price your home, getting it sold so you come out ahead instead of burdened by loss of money.