The residential real estate market is all about numbers with the most important one being the price of a home.
As the spring market starts to heat up now, more listings will start popping up across the city and activity will pick up as April, May and June are the busiest months of the year for MLS transactions.
So the pricing of a home to hit the market becomes a critical component of the real estate industry.
If a home is priced too high it won’t sell. If it’s priced too low, a seller could stand to lose thousands of dollars.
That’s why it’s critical to engage a professional – a realtor – to ensure that the pricing of a home is done as accurately as possible, says Elton Ash, Regional Executive Vice President of RE/MAX of Western Canada.
What the realtor brings to the table – literally to the kitchen table – sitting down with the consumer to see if they will have a relationship going forward, is expertise, knowledge and experience in looking at the overall complexity of a transaction in today’s environment.
“The purchase and sale of a home has become ever more complex,” says Ash. “It’s a far more complicated transaction than what it was 25 or 30 years ago.”
He says the biggest issue people have in selling something – whether it’s a home, a car or a piece of furniture – is that the more expensive an item becomes the greater the vested interest.
This is of greater relevance when it comes to the real estate market. Personal feelings can get in the way of properly pricing a home that is going to be listed for sale.
Using a third-party, or a realtor, in putting a home on the market for sale is the greatest advantage for a seller – taking away the bias and having a professional giving an unbiased, independent assessment of what a home should be listed at.
“Nowadays any home seller can pull up comparables . . . and do a fair amount of research on determining what their value should be but to have this huge vested interest in your property is a bit of a bias,” says Ash. “To have that third-party come in or provide more of an unbiased opinion or direction as to where the pricing should be it ultimately provides the seller better opportunity to be realistic with the marketing price.”
And why is that important?
“I’ve been in this business for 35 years now. And it has never changed in that you want to have the best price out of the gate because you’ll get the greatest amount of interest in that first 10 days and because you’re coming into the market with an inventory of buyers that are out there already looking and that’s when that volume is going to hit right away,” says Ash.
“You’re fresh on the market and if you don’t have it properly priced at that moment you’re losing a huge impact because thereafter you’re just dealing with buyers as they come into the market and then you’re playing catchup.”
The pricing of a property is critical, he adds.
Coming up with a price is indeed a science that is combined with a gut feeling which can only come with experience – and that’s where a realtor’s value truly comes in for potential home sellers.