Broken Record

If we start to sound like a broken record, it’s because one simple truism bears constant repetition in today’s real estate market. “Price, price, price” is so fundamental to the success of every new property transaction that we can never say it too often or with too much conviction. If you’re troubled by the lack of potential buyers previewing your home, don’t be tempted to cushion your disappointment by attributing the inactivity to added fallout from today’s economic environment. With multiple sales occurring every day across the entire spectrum of price, an overpriced home is more likely to blame.

Here’s a happier truism that also bears constant repeating: There’s a committed buyer waiting to pounce on every aggressively priced home. Including yours. This is evidenced by the huge inventory of available homes—in every neighborhood and every price range—being steadily consumed from the bottom up by the most value-obsessed buyers in recent memory. If you must sell your home in today’s market, you must commit to pricing it better than the vast majority of its competition. Where an unbeatable location once ruled the day, an unbeatable price is now the only game in town.

Although the sheer number of potential buyers has leveled off considerably from the headiest days of the boom, quality has replaced quantity. Serious, well-funded, end-use buyers—many of whom pay cash and actually intend to occupy the home—are being motivated by prices not seen in more than a half-dozen years. Truth be told, they are combing the market in far greater numbers than most media-hardened consumers have been conditioned to believe. To eventually sit across a closing table from the future owners of your home, you must be willing to price it with a similar degree of motivation. When mutual degrees of buyer and seller motivation collide, contracts and checkbooks magically appear.

How do we know there are plenty of value-conscious buyers letting their fingers do the walking across a computer keyboard in advance of making a well-informed offer?

Since launching the special “Best Opportunities” section of michaelsaunders.com—just over eight months ago—the number of online showings for eligible properties has been nine times higher than properties not eligible for the section. Clearly the greatest number of committed buyers is focusing its efforts where the greatest values are guaranteed.

With over 145,540 unique visits to the Best Opportunity section of michaelsaunders.com, 96.1% of these visitors experienced two or more Best Opportunity showings per visit. 63.7% of these showings are by repeat visitors to the section; which means that every third visit captures a new buyer!

More importantly, of the 335 properties that have been showcased on Best Opportunities thus far, 20.6 percent have sold in an expedited time frame—a rate 31% higher than properties sold throughout the entire regional MLS. Another 22 properties are presently under contract. Many of these homes are bank-owned properties for those who wish to investigate such opportunities.

How can your property qualify for inclusion in Best Opportunities?

Real estate companies do not establish or control market prices. Economic forces—mainly the law of supply and demand—do.

To guarantee that the homes featured in Best Opportunities are among the most competitively priced at any given time, we regularly convene an in-house panel of the region’s most seasoned real estate experts to painstakingly scrutinize each property vying for inclusion. Together they make sure that each is priced within certain market-driven parameters which, when met, qualify it as one of the best values in its competitive set.

To be featured in Best Opportunities each home must adhere to at least one of the following criteria. It must be:

1.) Priced below a recent certified appraisal, or…
2.) Priced below a CMA (Competitive Market Analysis), or…
3.) Priced below other homes in its competitive set

If for any reason a home listed in Best Opportunities ceases to meet at least one of these aforementioned qualifiers, an appropriate price adjustment is recommended to the seller in order to re-qualify for inclusion in the section. This way, when a buyer purchases one of the price-vetted properties in Best Opportunities, they are assured of owning one of the best values in today’s market. It’s that simple.

So forgive us if we constantly repeat the market’s most important new imperative—again and again. Price, price, price. If your home can be among the best-priced opportunities in its competitive set, why not showcase it where the largest mass of potential buyers shows up—again and again—to scour for the most dependable values in Southwest Florida? We’ve done the homework. The next step is yours.