Value of Your Home
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade
The Real Value of Your Home
The real value of your home is the price for which you sell it.
You’ve seen those ads on Facebook that promise to tell you what your home is worth. To learn that you have to give up your email address. The real estate industry calls this lead generation. If you are lonely and want more emails, then this is for you.
For what it’s worth, find out yourself
You can find the value of your home yourself. There are hundreds of websites where you can check the sale prices of similar homes. Check out the automated valuations of your home on real estate portals like Zillow or Realtor.com. You will learn the approximate value of your home. What you will not learn is how much your home will sell for.
The value of your home? Right on the money
On the day of the listing, you and I know the correct listing price. It will sell at least for that price. For the preceding weeks, you and I have followed the market closely. Now we know the condition and history of every similar home active, pending and sold. We know the words and pictures used to sell these competing homes. We know the quality of marketing for each home. We know the days on market and pricing history for each. Because we shared these insights, we agreed on the listing price of your home. That listing price is the value of your home.
Preparation and presentation
While we were following the market, we prepared your home for listing. We did everything reasonable to make your home move-in-ready. We decided together what needed to get done and how to make that happen.
Looking beyond the day of the listing, I know exactly how I will market your home and how I will measure the effectiveness of my marketing. I also know from experience on how to field inquiries from agents who represent potential buyers. What I say and don’t say will be important. In any case, I will always be truthful.
Proof of the (plum) pudding
How can I be so sure? With nearly 17 years in the business, I can run on my record. Except for a short sale, I did not reduce the price of any of my listings for the past three years. The average sales price was 4.7% over list. The average days on the market was seven days.
Despite a quickly cooling market, my most recent sale is a listing that closed on November 19 after being on the market a mere two days. Specifically, I listed this Redmond condo for $525,000 and sold it for $530,000. A very similar condo only two blocks away was listed for $595,000, then reduced to $560,000 and eventually sold for $510,000 after being on the market for 87 days. Correct pricing is everything. Correct pricing reflects the real value of your home.
Not resting on my laurels
Real estate is a seriously competitive business. In 2018, I added the Personal Real Estate Portal (PREP). PREP is a unique service for my listing clients. For 2019, I’ve created ReSeattle.com, a new website just for home sellers. SeattleRealEstateNews.com (SERENE) is now exclusively serving buyers with real-time property search results buyers have come to expect. What connects the two sites is their design and the person behind them.
Also, I’m happy to report that I won for the seventh year in a row the distinction of ranking in the top four percent of Seattle area real estate agents as published by the Seattle Magazine.
I’m looking forward to serving your real estate needs in the coming months and wish you and your loved ones a peaceful and successful New Year.
First published by Gerhard as his
December 2018 View from the Street Newsletter.
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