Selling Your Home in Marin County: How Do I Reduce the Price if it is not selling?
Price reductions are something we always try to avoid by pricing the home right from the beginning. But if the home isn’t moving, or the seller’s goals change, in today’s market it is sometimes a necessity.
We recently listed 23 Gothic in Novato at $1,090,000, a 4/4, 2,895 sq ft house. New a year ago, beautiful construction, an amazing great room and kitchen:
The big drawback for the home was the stairs, and lots of them. That takes a lot of people out of the market for the home as soon as they see them. So we priced it to reflect the stairs, as well as what was happening in the market.
I got a call a little over a week ago from the seller, who wanted to know what we could do to move the home more quickly, even though it had been on market for 21 days. His goals had changed.
We re-computed the analysis we did when pricing it originally. There were 21 homes available in Novato, from $950,000 to $1,150,000 with four bedrooms and at least three baths, and only one was in contract. That’s a lot of competition!
We were priced at $376 a square foot, just a little under the average for available properties at the time. However the average cost per square foot for sold properties in the last 90 days was $367 a foot.
We quickly figured a simple reduction to $1,049,000 would put him at $362 a foot, slightly below the sold comps, and made the change last week.
We got an offer a few days later, and are now in contract.
It’s critical to make your home stand out from everyone else’s in this market, but especially in towns like Novato, which is a Buyer’s Market right now with lots of inventory. It’s not always as simple as price per square foot - but that’s always a great place to start, we believe.
By the way, I ran the data this morning for the parameters above. Cost per square foot for active properties is now $391 a foot, and for sold properties is $367 a foot.
I don’t think that’s an accident. If your home isn’t selling, and you need it to sell - you need to consider what you can do to increase it’s value, and a price reduction is the simplest and fastest way to do it.
