In response to my Pricing Your Home to Sell blog someone sent me an article on the Wall Street Journal about how critical the first week is for a listing. This article detailed out the number of online visits a listing received on their website and how that declined over time. Here is the graph and link to the article.
I keep a book of all the properties for sale in East Sac and update it when there is any change in status. Out of about 100 properties, about 10-15 make it into my short list of “great house, condition and location for its price”. Some houses will only make it onto the list after many price reductions over several months.
I was recommending one such property to someone at a recent open house and she had commented that she saw that house a couple months ago but wasn’t interested in it. She couldn’t remember why she wasn’t interested in it, just that she dismissed it and now it wasn’t worth looking at.
After talking about it we discovered that she liked the house when she first saw it, but thought it was priced too high to put in a reasonable offer on it. The high initial listing price made many buyers dismissed it, and then when its price was reduced enough to be reasonable, most people just remembered that they dismissed it and didn’t give it a second look. Between this phenomenon of remembering the rejection but not the reason and “it’s been listed for 90 days and no one else has bought it, so there must be something wrong with it” syndrome, a high initial listing price can be the greatest detriment to a property selling.
