A Toronto Real Estate Agents Guide to Pricing Your House Properly… The First Time

There are many ways for a Toronto Realtor to develop the right price for a property and we use them all depending on the situation. There are many variables that need consideration because one variable could drastically alter the amount that you want to list your property at.

Why is it important to list at the right price? The best price to list your property at is the price that will be the closest to what it will actually sell for. I know that sounds obvious but we run in to a lot of clients who feel that their property is worth a lot more then it is and they want to “try” their higher price first.

Some Realtors are tempted to let their clients do this because they have a fear that they won’t get the listing and some other agent will. Some clients might say that the real estate agent just wants to sell it at low price so it will be quick and they can move on. If that is the Realtors attitude you will sense it in all of their work with you, not just the price. A good Realtor will actually stick to their pricing and not suggest that they can get more for you just so that they can get the listing.

First impression is the most important thing when selling a home. People search for real estate in select areas and tight price brackets. $325-$375K Loft Downtown, $400-$450K in Leslieville, $800-$900K in Summerhill, $1.3M- $1.5M in Lytton Park, $2.5M-$3M in South Rosedale, etc… They will typically look at houses that are listed for lower than the ceiling of their budget but serious buyers will never look at properties beyond their budget.

Your best market exposure is the first 21 days after you first expose the property to the open market. This is when you will get the most amount of money for your home and hopefully not leave anything on the table. The market experts will get their first glimpse of what you have to sell. The experts are all of the active Realtors in the market and their buyer clients. These people know everything about your market and what is going on in it. The Experts will see it in their daily updates and will be calling their specific clients who want to buy a property like yours. Neighbours will be calling their friends who have always talked about wanting to move into the area, and people who are looking in the papers, or online resources will be seeing it for the first time and will be contacting their Realtor.

Trying an unrealistic list price will result in you you will not reaching the right group of experts and they will simply be unimpressed with what you are offering at the inflated price. They are looking in their price bracket and they will not want to buy something that is not comparable to what else they are seeing in their price category. This will actually just help the other listed homes look like a better value.

If you waste that opportunity to make your first impression you will never get it back. As soon as you have stopped getting showings and everyone realizes  that the property is overpriced it will take at least a 10% price reduction to stir up some new interest.

Someone with a budget of $1.6M looking to buy a house on Alexandra in Lytton Park will not want to purchase a 25 foot wide property, un-renovated that the owner thinks is worth $1,595K when it really shouldn’t be higher than $1,400K. This will annoy the experts and they will talk poorly about wasting their time, which will give you further negative exposure, it will sit on the market becoming stale, it will get a stigma of something being wrong with it and most importantly it will miss reaching the realistic market of active clients looking to buy a house in Lytton Park for $1.3M-$1.450K.

One of the key things a good Realtor does each week is go and visit every new listing in our select market place. This helps us build an automatic sense of what the right price is, what is too high, or what is great value. That is a really good reason to hire an agent that works specifically in the area that you want to live in.

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