When it comes to working with my clients, I present myself to them as their personal adviser. Like anything, emotions play a big role when purchasing a home. My role as their adviser is to make sure they are making choices based off of sound information. Today, I will give you a bit of insight as to how I like to go about working with my clients.
So, how much to offer? As you can imagine, there is no one right answer. I see my role in this part of the process as an advisor.
Like with any purchase decision, emotions play a big factor when buying the home. My job is to make sure that those emotions are grounded with sound information so that buyers can make these highly personal decisions informed and competently. Let me walk you through how I advise my clients in this situation to help them make an informed decision that they’re comfortable with.
1. Relevant sales in the area
First, we review any relevant recent sales in the area to give you some ballpark expectations. While it is sometimes difficult to get direct apples to apples comparables, we can generally find a few prior listings that give us a range to work with.
2. Balanced market value
In addition, I do a basic analysis to determine what the home would reasonably sell for in a more balanced market, which gives us another price anchor to work with to make sure we don’t get too far from reason.
3. Number of visits
Next, we look at how busy the home was during our visit. Since, these days, most homes that go up for sale sell in a weekend, all visits take place on Saturdays and Sundays, which means we can get a feel for the level of interest. To keep things fair for all parties, the amount of the offers are not allowed to be disclosed to anyone. But we do know the number of offers, which is another helpful hint.
4. Deep, local expertise
Having worked in the area, we are also familiar with the details associated with other similar sales, which helps us bring additional perspective to the decision.
Calculating the offer range.
Ultimately, I provide a range that I believe the home will sell for, with a high end that awards you a 95% chance of getting that home and a low end that give you a 50% chance.
Inside that range, you get to decide if this is your dream home and you want to put your best possible offer forward–or if you like the home, but wouldn’t be too upset if you lost it.
So all in all, what we do is as a real estate broker, we take our knowledge of the area, or knowledge of the behavior of other buyers and other scenarios we’ve gone through as we use that to gauge how to guide our clients.
This is #AskPete. If you have any real estate questions, feel free to send them and I will get you the answers. Or stay up to date on the latest tips for real estate buyers and sellers by clicking the YouTube button below: