Should You Be Realistic or Just Lucky In This Real Estate Market?

Jim Duncan wrote “Should Sellers be More Patient?”

It seems to me that here in the New River Valley, we’re seeing some more realistic pricing among many sellers, but at the end of the day price is what matters. And if your home isn’t priced right, it’s not going to sell. I wanted to look at our numbers as compared to Charlottesville’s, and here’s what I found (if I left a category out it’s because our MLS doesn’t provide an easy way to search that particular item):

Category	New River Valley	Charlottesville
# of properties Under Contract	180	426
# of properties Under Contract marked as Short Sale or Foreclosure	5	81
# of properties Under Contract for sale less than 30 days	37 (21%)	193 (45%)
# of properties Under Contract for sale more than 180 days	58	94

Gone are the days of putting a price on a home and getting lucky. The fact is that if you’re going to get a home sold, it has to be priced right, show great, and … honestly, you have to get a little lucky. Buyers have the pick of the market right now, and they are being picky. That’s a good thing in some ways, as it’s balancing out the real estate market in some ways, but as a seller know that whether you’re a FSBO, on the open market, or just thinking about selling, price matters. What your neighbor sold for last month doesn’t matter, and if there are foreclosures or short sales in your neighborhood, those are going to be putting downward pressure on prices as well.

Thanks, Alma, for compiling the data. Want to track values in YOUR neighborhood? Read this post.

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.