#Property: Be sensible when placing your house on the market
Failing to price your property right could see you lose out.

Get the price right and get it right from the start.
The best way to create interest in your home that leads to a sale, is to price the property correctly when launching it onto the market.
You only get one chance to market your home for the first time. Time and time again it is in the initial four to eight weeks that get you the best results for a successful sale or rental.
You can never recapture this time; so think really hard about that asking price and work out how serious about selling, or renting, you really are.
But why, you may ask, is it the first month or two that gets the best result?
It’s quite hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but it is related to buying psychology and the windows of opportunity more than anything else.
Whether it is right or wrong, if a property, or most properties at least, are on the market for longer than three months, the buyer perception is that it is going stale, that no one else likes it, and that there must be something wrong with it.
It is very hard to remove those negative buyer thoughts once they are embedded.

A good price reduction can rescue that situation, but you might now have to start going lower than the initial valuation.
The best way to illustrate this is to give an example, one of hundreds I could expound on where this has happened.
We had a property we valued at R5.5-million but the owner wanted to try it at R6-million. Of course, this was his right.
After two months of low activity and no bites, the owner agreed to reduce it to R5.6-million, much closer to the original valuation. Because the property was now exposed in the market and did not hold the excitement of a fresh, new listing, this price reduction actually had very little effect.
This resulted in some more viewings, a bit more interest – but we were still without a result. Two months later, and a more motivated seller, the price was reduced to R5.25-million and we concluded a sale at R5.15-million.
The point here, and many agents will testify to this, if the property had been launched at R5.5-million in the beginning, they would have almost certainly sold at that price or no lower than
R5.4-million.
Don’t be tempted to try and add on too much fat because you are “not in a rush”. Because, the day you are in a rush, you will have to be prepared to do more than just trim the fat.
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