Best Tips to Price Your Home If You Are Thinking of Selling

The Weekly Recap

Good morning and Friday! Trump could declare a national housing emergency before the fall is up to standardize local zoning and building codes, we’re 11 days out from the next Fed meeting where odds are high of a rate drop. Manhattan office leasing is back and churning at high levels, there is more new housing inventory on the market since 2008 nationally. Mayor Adams may have a federal job at HUD dangled in front of him to drop out of the mayoral race to consolidate the field and my beloved New York Giants are proving that even though you may be a loser, you can still be worth $10 billion.

Best Tips to Price Your Home If You Are Thinking of Selling

A big challenge of being a seller and bringing your home to market is deciding on the price to offer your home. The need to separate the emotional connection and initial investment cost from the analytical aspect of what the market is currently trading at can lead you to two very different numbers. When it comes to pricing a home and talking to sellers, I always like to preface the conversation with two key points. First, the number one reason something doesn’t sell is because of price and secondly, I want to sell your home at the highest price in the shortest amount of time possible and the best way to do that is to understand what the market bears.

Choosing the Best Comps: The best way to determine where your pricing should be is where the most ‘apples to apples’ comparisons can take place. In NYC, those comps are directly in your building, in the suburbs it will be within a few block radius. Remembering that there are four types of markets, the national market, local market, neighborhood market and building market, the deeper an analysis we can do on the micro building market will allow us to price competitively and aligned with demand.

Understanding External Influences: While comps are a good foundational starting point to understand what has sold where and at what price, it is also important to take in the exigent circumstances that may have impacted that pricing strategy. While we can never understand the psychology of other sellers and why they choose to list at certain numbers, we can look at what the rate environment was at the time of a previous sale to where we are now, the macroeconomic conditions, the level of uncertainty that may have existed due to societal pressures, how the larger market was transacting etc.

Don’t Overprice for ‘Negotiating Room’: If you overprice, your home will sit. And the longer your home sits on the market, the less leverage you have in negotiation. Pricing for what the market bears will drive increased buyer interest in where you can potentially negotiate your price up if there are competing offers driven by a great quality property in a market with low supply

Be Flexible and Willing to Reassess: Even though we try to be analytical, the emotion of selling a home can cloud judgment and create unfavorable conditions for going to market if priced too high. Sometimes there is going to be an aspirational price that someone will want to list their home at which is higher than what the asset would probably trade for and that is okay. As long as you are willing to make adjustments when you do not see traffic or interest start to come in within the first 7-10 days on the market.

Sellers also have a tendency to feel that showing price reductions is a bad look for a listing and I disagree with that sentiment. To me, if I am representing a buyer and see a listing has dropped price, it tells me that the owners are realistic in where the market is and are looking to move. The only thing that is a bad look for a listing is when it remains at its initial launch price and has sat on the market for an extended period of time outside the average days on market for a like listing.

If you’re thinking about listing your home, feel free to reach out so we can discuss your goals and put together a market evaluation for your home.

Market Performance

Here are how some other indexes and asset classes have performed as of this morning’s opening bell.

NYC Market Update

Here is a view of NYC market activity over the past week.

Mortgage Rate Update

Mortgage rates continue to fall lower as purchase demand continues to trend upwards. The continuity of rates moving down continues to increase optimism for new homebuyers and current homeowners. Refinance applications made up 47% of all mortgage applications this week, marking an eleven month high.

News You Can Use

• Trump Weighs Declaring National Housing Emergency Bloomberg

• Fed Announces New Capital Levels for Large Banks Reuters

• The Second-Home Mortgage Tax Break Few Americans Know About NY Post

• Manhattan Office Leasing on Track to Hit Highest Volume Since 2019 CNBC

• New Home Inventory Is At Its Highest Levels Since 2008 Fortune

• Is Mayor Adams Dropping Out of the NYC Mayoral Race? Gothamist

• Could Bond Markets Finally Be Making Sense Again? Bloomberg

• New York Giants Agree to Sell Minority Stake to Koch Family Bloomberg

• 12 Completely Free Things to Do in NYC During September Gothamist

The Deep Insight

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