Price & Market Your Home

How to Price & Market Your Home

If you’ve made it to this step in our Seller’s Guide, give yourself a pat on the back! You’ve gotten a lot of the nitty gritty work out of the way, and your home is prepared to enter the market. Now you’re ready to start pricing and listing your home for sale.

Pricing Your Home

When you’re ready to sell your home, pricing can be the trickiest part of the process. Should you start out with a high asking price, and then negotiate it down? Why are some listing prices a whole number and others not — where is the difference coming from? How long is too long for your house to be listed before you need to lower the price? Should you position the price of your house in favor of a bidding war?

These are questions Accattato & CO. Real Estate can answer from decades of experience selling houses in fluctuating markets. We can help you decide if you’re better off listing high and patiently awaiting the right buyer, or asking on the lower end in order to sell fast, and we can teach you how to avoid the number one mistake buyers make when pricing their homes. The right realtor will ask questions about your expectations and goals before helping you develop a pricing strategy for your home. It’s important to start off with the right asking price because you’re essentially setting the first number in a negotiation and you should always have the upper hand when selling your home.

In determining how much your house is worth, it is critical to factor in:

1. Current market conditions

2. The pros and cons of your home

3. Other properties on the market

4. Recent home sales in your neighborhood

Remember that your home is only worth whatever price the buyer is ultimately willing to pay, but that doesn’t mean your pricing strategy can’t work in your favor to boost profits. Accattato & CO. Real Estate has pricing strategy down to a science and can help you navigate the numbers game to choose the right asking price.

How Accattato & CO. Can Help You Price Your Home

When you choose our talented agents, you’re automatically giving yourself an advantage — several advantages actually! With Accattato & CO. Real Estate on your side, you’ll get:

1. Insider knowledge regarding the market, comparable sales, and statistical data 

2. Experience knowing what sells, what doesn’t sell, and why or why not Authority on the competition, since we’ve physically seen the other homes on the market 

3. The right pricing strategy for your home

4. A proven track record of successfully out-performing other agents — ask us about our days-on-market statistics and price-to-sold price ratio. 

Marketing Your Home

Most realtors won’t tell you that their marketing plan for selling your home only consists of getting it on MLS, but we aren’t most realtors. Accattato & CO. Real Estate understands that marketing is a multidimensional game — our marketing plan for selling your home goes way behind a simple MLS listing and we have the resources to give you an edge on the competition. We want your home to sell and know how to market your home appropriately. Our ideal marketing plan is broken down into four parts:

1. Identifying the Ideal Buyer

Great marketing means understanding and targeting your audience. In order to understand your ideal buyer, you need to think about your home’s potential and visualize your perfect buyer. Who is most likely to buy your home — a large family, an older couple, or a young, single buyer? What features within the house will appeal to them most? What benefits will your ideal buyer get from your type of home and location? Once you can pinpoint your ideal buyer, you know your audience and can develop a targeted marketing strategy.

2. Choosing the Right Marketing Channels

Depending on your ideal buyer, there are certain marketing channels that will be more effective than others. It is very important that the marketing for your home is written and tailored to appeal to your ideal buyer, enabling you to target your home’s serious buyers and weed out the rest.

For instance, if your ideal buyer is a senior citizen, they will most likely respond best to a mail marketing campaign, such as postcards or flyers — the likelihood of them being active online is lower in comparison to a younger buyer. If your ideal buyer is a young millennial, they will most likely see your home on social media and respond accordingly. In some circumstances, it may be best to market your home in a variety of ways to increase the potential of selling your home, but in others it will make the most sense to target your marketing through one or two specific channels.

3. Taking the Perfect Photos for Your Home’s Online Listing

Let’s face it: in today’s world, the majority of homes are found through online listings. That’s why it is extremely important to choose photos that show your home in the best light. An online buyer will immediately be drawn in by outstanding listing photos; if there are very few, low quality photos available of your home or none at all, your listing will suffer.

We highly recommend you get professional photos taken, or at least use a camera better than the one on your new iPhone. Cell phone cameras just won’t do your home justice. In our digital age, high quality photos can make or break a listing. Take our advice; we’ve been here a few (hundred) times.

4. Exposing Your Home to Active & Inactive Buyers

Optimally, your ideal buyer is actively searching for a home. They are looking at online listings, using an agent, and house hunting in person. However, your ideal buyer could be someone who doesn’t even know they’re ready to buy a home yet, but if they see your listing and fall in love…

But how do you find these inactive buyers? Well, that’s when your real estate agent can really have an impact on marketing your home for sale. Truly effective marketing of a listing can reach both those who are already in the market for a new home and those who are not. Accattato & CO. Real Estate has a vast network of professional contacts, tried and true marketing techniques, and years of experience seeing what works and what doesn’t.

How Accattato & CO. Real Estate Can Help You Market Your Home

1. We have an authoritative presence online and in the industry.

2. We mix traditional advertising elements with modern techniques.

3. We don’t just sell homes, we buy homes too! We know how buyers think. We can identify your ideal buyer and direct them to your home.

4. We understand the power of social media and harness it appropriately.

5. We work with professionals in the advertising industry to guarantee high quality photos, well-written descriptions, well designed listings, and we utilize search engine experts.

6. We have a vast network of potential buyers and agents to work with to get your house sold efficiently.

7. We devise a multifaceted marketing plan to not only market your house, but your neighborhood too. 

8. We know how to make your house stand out from the rest of the competition.