FSBO Establishing Price

Establishing price can be difficult for an owner because of emotional attachment to the property. Try to be as objective as you can. Your list price should be determined by what similar homes have sold for recently (comps), and the price of comps that are currently on the market. Make sure the comps you use have been listed within the year and are as much like your house as possible. Don’t compare apples to oranges.

After you have compared your home to the comps you should be able to determine an amount you want to sell for. It’s not only the home but the amount and quality of the land it is on. You can try to figure out what your land is worth by comparing it to the similar properties you found. Try to determine a price per acre, and then multiply by the number of acres your home is on. Add that to what your home is worth without the land to get the amount your property is worth. Take that number and increase it 5% or so. This will give you wiggle room when you are negotiating. A Realtor will have easy access to tax data which makes this much easier.

Your property must appraise for the amount of the loan, or more, if one is involved. This means a bank won’t give you more money than what a property is worth. The bank will send out its own appraiser to decide whether or not to give the loan to the buyers.

Don’t use round numbers. A home listed for 199,900 could be rounded to 200,000 and you wouldn’t think it makes that big of a difference, but it does. A home buyer in this price range would be much more comfortable seeing a 1 at the front of the price than a 2. Having your price below a round number will also make you show up on the internet more often. If your price is right, your home will be more likely to sell faster.