How not to sell your Outer Banks Home

Yesterday I was out showing property to some great clients from Pennsylvania. They purchased a home from me a few years back and decided it was time to get another. One of the things I like to provide my clients when looking at homes is the MLS history. As long as the address was entered correctly in the MLS it will show when the property was first listed, how many times it has been listed and all the times the information has been amended. Occasionally you’ll also see when the property was previously sold as well. While looking we found the perfect example on how not to sell your Outer Banks home.

Making good decisions:

We viewed a home that had been on the market for quite some time and looked at the property history. It showed that the property had been listed a couple years ago at $200,000 more than its current list price. It had been incrementally reduced at least twelve times during the course of the listing period! You feel bad for the seller in this situation. Obviously they still want to sell it since the price continues to drop. In fact the last price reduction occurred less than a month ago. I wonder if they had been receiving bad advice or just never really knew what was going on in the Outer Banks real estate market. Either way making good decisions about pricing a property here requires good information about which way the market is heading and a strong knowledge of recent similar sales.

What was lost?

Had this property been priced right in the first place, it is almost a sure thing that the seller would have received more for his property when prices were much higher than they are now. Furthermore, they would not have had the expenses of carrying this property during the remainder of the marketing period. One last point…had the seller sold his home in 2008 he could have put the money he received at settlement in the bank and made some interest on it. Pricing the property incorrectly has cost this seller tens of thousands (and maybe hundreds of thousands) hard earned dollars. When getting ready to sell your Outer Banks home, make sure you contact an agent at Scott Team Realty. We will help you put the right price on the property so it sells in the time period you prefer.

If you have any other questions regarding Outer Banks real estate then feel free to check out our website!