Perfecting The Pricing Pitch
One of the reasons for an agent’s success during the listing presentation and beyond is making sure you have all of the informational materials on the home prepared to educate sellers.

“You really have to show the reality of it to sellers on paper,” Hibbs says.  “Today, anyone can go online and find the fair market value, but I don’t place a whole lot of value on going online. Many people are fighting their tax bills and winning, but when you do that your assessed value decreases. So when this happens, you cannot list it at what you may have before. To show your client this you can, for example, show them listings throughout their entire town instead of just their neighborhood.”

And something that agents often don’t take into account is how the property is already furnished – furnishings and decor will determine how a home will show, which has an affect on pricing, too. To perfect this aspect, stagers and declutterers are often brought in to make sure the home shows as well as it can.

Kerbis advises agents to keep an open mind if they feel that their client could be somewhat right about the pricing, even if the agent feels it is a bit high.

“The strategy is, you price at their price for a week or two, and if there is no traction in the marketplace for the listing, the agreement is that they then reduce it to your price point,” Kerbis says. “This tends to be my strategy for all clients, because we will know immediately if the market tells us the pricing is not going to work, because it shows in the first week or two, although in most cases, clients agree with my pricing.”

In some cases, if the agent and the seller cannot reach an agreement on pricing, it is a mutually beneficial decision for both the agent and the seller to part ways sooner rather than further into the process, when the listing has grown stagnant and lost value.

“Ultimately, the decision depends on who the client is and how much influence you can have. If there is no hope of changing the client’s mind and you believe strongly that their desired pricing is not realistic, there is no reason to take the listing,” Kerbis says.