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Pricing
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Written by Joanne Cleaver, ForSaleByOwner.com staff
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Homeowner Yetta Levitt knows more about real estate values than most agents – which she’s not. She tracks the sale price of local properties through public records. She visits neighborhood open houses to check out their condition and asking prices. She posts online comments about local property value trends as reported in local news stories.
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Pricing
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Written by Joanne Cleaver
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No wonder Matt Townsend built himself a man-cave.
With eleven children, a wife, and a baby grandchild sharing his modern log house in rural Delaware, Townsend needs a place to get away. But he kept resale value in mind when he included an office with a full bathroom adjacent to the three-car garage he built. The office is perfect as a rental, teen suite, self-contained office for a small business, or creative retreat.
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Pricing
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Written by Joanne Cleaver, ForSaleByOwner.com staff
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Can you quantify charm?
Jean Feingold thought so. Her 1920’s era Spanish Colonial bungalow is cute all over. It has the original fireplace, wood floors, arched doorways and all the other details you’d expect of a Florida house built in 1928.Â
For better or worse, the bungalow also has some less enticing vintage characteristics: an outmoded kitchen, only one bathroom, and, it lacks central air conditioning.
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Pricing
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Written by Joanne Cleaver, ForSaleByOwner.com staff
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The harsh reality for as many as a quarter of American homeowners is that their houses are worth less than the outstanding mortgages.
The only thing worse than being ‘under water’ on your mortgage is not coming to grips with it. That is why ForSaleByOwner.com recommends that all homeowners use publicly available and low-cost tools – all found at ForSaleByOwner.com – to closely track the market value of their homes.
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Pricing
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Written by By Joanne Cleaver, ForSaleByOwner.com
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The ‘comparative market analysis’, or CMA, is the old standby marketing tool for agents trying to win listings. The agents try to demonstrate the value they bring to the transaction by pulling supposedly proprietary sales numbers from databases run by their associations and the multiple listing service, to assemble a set of recent and pending home sales that can provide context for pricing your house.
That assumes, of course, that the data the agents are using is accurate. That assumption is being severely tested. In midsummer 2011, the Chicago Tribune broke a story that statistics generated by the Illinois Association of Realtors were off by 8% and more. It gets worse: the statistics erroneously indicated a major improvement in sales and prices in the City of Chicago. Corrections will reach back three years.
And the National Association of Realtors, finally rising to challenges to its own methodology, is scheduled to release its own revisions in late summer 2011. Industry critics believe that the NAR’s flawed bean counting could have inflated the volume of home sales by as much as 20%. Overstatements of that scope, of course, distort prices because agents pressure homeowners to drop prices when houses don’t sell promptly. If buyers’ interest in your house is lagging compared to market norms as indicated by agents’ statistics, your agent will use that ‘evidence’ to pressure you to cut your price, trim your equity recapture, and close a deal.Â
Here are five reliable sources of home pricing trends and data that you can use to construct a sturdy comparative market analysis.
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