Tips on selling your house in a cooling market

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

What a difference a few months make. In most parts of the country, the days of putting your home up for sale at a ridiculously high price and waiting for competing offers to pour in are gone.

“Sellers have been trying to stick it to buyers,” says Kate Fleury Ryan, an agent with Long & Foster Realtors in McLean, Va. “Now they can’t do that.” 

Where the market has cooled, owners actually have to work at selling their property. So how do you deal with this new reality?

The key is realistic pricing. Jim Warkentin, another Realtor in McLean, says the recent hot market “was very forgiving” when a house was not priced right. “A trained chimp could put a property on the market and it would sell,” he says. Not anymore.

"Don't be a pig when it comes to money," warns Ilyce Glink, syndicated real estate columnist and author of the book “100 Questions Every Home Seller Should Ask.” 

Deciding to buy a house is easy when you know the value is going to skyrocket, she notes. Now buyers are taking the time to figure out the true value of the property.  When they sense that the price is right, or even a bit below market value, Glink says, “they’re going to jump all over it.”

How to set the asking price
Glink recommends listing your home at or below the competitive market price. If similar houses similar are priced at $300,000, list yours for $295,000 to generate an extra level of interest. “I guarantee you’re going to get a stream of people through the door,” she says, “and you may even end up with more money because you’ll get into a competitive bidding situation.”

You also need to be ready to respond quickly to changing market conditions. “The market today is not kind to someone who waits too long to lower the selling price,” says Warkentin. He sees buyers walking away from houses selling for $650,000 because the seller won’t come down a couple of thousand dollars — an insignificant amount considering the overall transaction. “A drop in price means a great deal right now,” he says.

Perks can help
“Buyers are not only price-sensitive, they also think in terms of the monthly payment,” says Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com. By offering to pay the closing costs or some of the points on the buyer’s loan, you can lower their monthly payment without lowering your asking price.  “With so many buyers strapped for cash today, that’s a big differential,” McBride says. “It can be the difference between getting a home sold now and waiting months.”

And that’s just what some sellers are doing. Emmett Smith, a Realtor in Richmond, Va., just closed a deal where the seller paid $5,000 in closing costs. “I haven’t seen that for a long time,” he told me. Laura Berman, an agent in the Grass Valley region of northern California, says in the last two deals she negotiated, the seller paid the buyer’s closing costs — $6,000 in one case and $13,000 in the other.

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