People are more motivated by avoiding pain than they are to gain pleasure according to science. It’s a factor of x2. So I want you to imagine for a moment as a home seller, if we were sitting across the kitchen table from each other and I said mister or misses home seller… If you don’t spend $2,000 on X, Y, and Z, when you get the offer on your house, they’re going to take $10,000 out of the offer. Or mister and misses home seller, when you get to the settlement table, they’re going to take $10,000 out of your profit sheet!!!
Now imagine the same conversation like this: mister and misses home seller, if you spend $2,000 fixing up your house while getting ready to sell doing X, Y, and Z, when it comes time to sell it, your offer is going to be $10,000 higher!
What I found is that most people are more motivated by not losing money than they are by gaining money. But really guys, it’s the same $10,000 and what people don’t understand is that houses sell in a, in a range. There’s a price swing effect. Some houses sell at the top of the market, some at the bottom of the market, and according to the National Association of Realtors, a national statistic is 46.5% of houses actually fail to sell.
We feel like we have an obligation to tell you all of the things you could and should do to sell your house for the most money or avoid losing the most money. We hire a home staging consultant or a professional decorator. Their job is to come to your home and go through every room and tell you all of the things that you could and should do. A lot of those things don’t cost any money…
Things like- get a storage unit and put all this stuff in there, move all this furniture from one side of the room to the other, maybe do some painting, some decluttering.
Using the above metric, we have found on average that it cost our home sellers about $2,000 using a contractor that we found to put granite countertops in a house. According to my appraiser, (BTW we pay for an appraisal in all of our listings), if you get granite countertops in your house in the average house in Calvert County, your net profit will be about $10,000. Using that analogy, if you have dated countertops you’re going to either lose $10,000 or gain $10,000 depending on how you look at it.
When a buyer is previewing a house, all of the things that they think that they need to do to either fix up your house or to fix it. If there’s something wrong with it in order to get it the way that they want it, according to statistics, they multiply that by a factor of six. So the $2,000 countertops in their mind, you know, according to science is $12,000 countertops.
I bought it for 50% less than the low retail price. You know how they give you the range? Like the trade in value versus the retail, which is about a 50% difference on this boat. I paid 50% less than the low end! And the point that I want to make here is that a lot of people sell their house without any expert advice. Apparently, only 21% of homeowners use a real estate agent to set the price of their house….
Recently we sold this house in Owings that appraised for $40,000 more than what the previous 2 Realtors told them their house would sell for. We actually sold it for $2,000 more than what it appraised for so they made out with $42,000 more than they thought they would!
#3) The third piece of advice is make sure that you’re working with a Certified Home Selling Advisor. Somebody who’s been certified by the National Association of Expert Advisors.
From there focusing on the kitchen, master bathroom and decorating the home to sell are where your attention should be.
Here is what happens in the majority of the cases where people over price their house. People start high and by the time they get to what the price of the house is really worth, they have already lowered it 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, even $200,000. In their mind they are thinking “I’ve lost all that money!” that’s money that they never had to begin with!
So when the house sits on the market for a long time you feel like you lost money, you’re not really happy with the real estate agent who didn’t sell your house, or perhaps your Real estate agent told you that your house was worth $450k just to get the listing (make sure you watch my video on 
Sometimes selling your house turns into a full-contact sport. There are all kinds of buyers out there! Most of them are great to work with but sometimes they can get a little greedy.
I’m going to give you three tips on how to prevent yourself from getting bullied by a greedy home buyer. The first tip is to have your house pre-appraised when you know what the house price is, you can negotiate from a position of strength also the buyer will believe the price of the appraiser over any real estate agent any day of the week. They are going to feel more comfortable paying full price or asking price for the house. When you know the price and they know the price, it is a lot harder for them to push you around at the negotiating table.
The second tip is to have your house pre-home inspected. This allows you to figure out everything that’s wrong with the house and fix the things that you want to fix and then when it comes time to negotiate you can actually negotiate out of doing repairs.
My third piece of advice is to make sure you hire Certified Home Selling Advisor. Someone who’s been certified by the National Association of Expert Advisors. Less than 1% of real estate agents nationwide hold this certification. It means that you’ve been extensively trained on how to sell houses for up to 18% more money using a proven process that’s backed by extensive research.
The best part of the process is we pay for a pre-appraisal a pre-home Inspection we pay for a home staging consultant to come to your house and explain how to get your house ready for today’s home buyer. We also get professional photos and video, if you want to learn more about how we sell houses for more money using a proven system click the link below and I’ll send you a video that explains everything my name is Brian Mayer with The Mayer Group make it a great day
Some people just want a certain amount of money for the house regardless of what you or I or anybody else thinks it’s worth and they’re just going to wait until somebody offers them that amount of money.
The next group of people is those that are committed to selling their house it’s more of a dip your toe in the water strategy. Imagine getting into a freezing pool and you let your body get accustomed to the water, you slowly move into the deep end. You’re not one of jump In the deep end person, you just want to move slowly.
The next reason most people overprice their house is probably the most common and that is that they don’t trust the real estate agents valuation maybe that real estate agent doesn’t appreciate all the upgrades and repairs you have done. Maybe they don’t appreciate your neighborhood and your area. Maybe they just don’t sell a lot of houses it’s basically a lack of trust. You don’t trust the real estate agents valuation. You feel you know more about what your home is worth then what they do, so you’re going to be in control and you’re going to be the one who sets the price.
I think most people are afraid of underselling their house and just giving away their equity to a buyer, that would be foolish. Of all the scenarios of overpricing your house and how it will play out, this is the only scenario where it will actually work out in your benefit. If you believe your house is worth $400,000 and it’s really worth $450,000 starting high will work in your benefit but in every other scenario, this will actually cost you money.
