I was sifting through recently closed sales the other day and noticed a property that had sold for its list price.  While I certainly don’t have a problem paying full price for a good deal, when I looked a little more closely I noticed that the list price had been dropped to the sales price … on the same day that the closing took place.  Someone emailed me later that day and asked me what the typical home in the New River Valley sold for relative to it’s list price.  Well, if I used the example of the house mentioned above, 100%. Every property that goes on the market sells for every dollar of the list price … but you and I know that’s probably not the case.

I just ran a search of homes sold in the last 30 days, and randomly picked five to sort through.  Of the 30 homes, the reported list price to sale price ratio was 95.36%.  Of the five selected:

• Property One – originally listed at $315000 and failed to sell after five months.  It was re-listed a few days after expiring, and then sold at $299900. – 95.20%
• Property Two – put on the market in September 2009 for $193500, then removed after a month.  Two days later it came back on the market, with a different agent, at $189700, then continually dropped until it sold a year later at $162000. – 83.72%
• Property Three – sold in five days.  It was listed at $209900 and sold at $213000, with $5937 in seller-paid concessions. – 101%
• Property Four – listed in May 2009 at $1.15 million. It was continually reduced until a year later it was removed from the market, then re-listed with another agent at $649000, and sold at $592000. – 51.47%
• Property Five – listed for $369900, expired, then was re-listed by the same agent at $362500.  After a couple of months its final list price was $347900, and it sold for $319500. – 86.37%

If you take the list to sales price of each property, the average is 83.5%, but since the property that sold for 51% of it’s original list price is an anomaly, when we take that out of the equation the average is 91.57%.

I hope this helps, Emailer.  Every situation is completely different, so don’t use this as a guide that if a property is listed for $100000 it’ll sell for $91570.  It does, however, speak to the fact that every property needs to be examined very closely.  Just as you’d kick the tires and look under the hood of a car you were considering buying, in order to understand the market you need to peer into property histories a bit, as well.