A Hot Market Can Be Deceptive

While much of the real estate news boasts home price appreciation and limited inventory selection, selling your home is not always necessarily an easy task.  It would seem with stories of multiple offers, and annual appreciation around the 10% clip, that buyers would be lining up to buy each and every home, but this is surely not the case.

The perfect home and sale usually comes with several characteristics like great schools, a private level yard, a quiet street, minimal stairs, a great floor plan including all the key rooms, a meticulously maintained home that’s been tastefully updated, a popular neighborhood, and finally, the home typically has a realistic price. Unfortunately, homes rarely, if ever, have all of these attributes. If they do, the owner will likely sell their home for over the asking price due to being the recipient of multiple offers. 

So while the market is clearly active, there are many sellers with fabulous homes who have been unsuccessful in their efforts to get their home sold.  To resolve this challenge, although not easy, sellers should step back and look at their home like a widget and determine what factors they can control versus what they cannot control.  Schools, level yard (location), a quiet street (location), neighborhood popularity (location), stairs, and floor plan are typically fixed items that cannot be changed in the short term. 

The items a seller can control, are however, how the home shows (updates, staging, privacy) and price. 
With this in mind, if a home is properly marketed and it has had in excess of 20 to 30 showings, with no realistic offers, it is paramount that the seller utilize their Realtor’s counsel. Then work proactively to improve how the home shows and frequently reevaluate the price.  While doing this isn’t necessarily welcome – with a smile – for sellers, the marketplace ultimately dictates the outcome. 

Today, despite the limited inventory and appreciation, selling can still be deceptively challenging.   This is the reason to hire an experienced Realtor, make a plan, listen to the marketplace, and to be actively diligent by improving the product and/or adjusting the price.