Despite the implication of online algorithms, which are easily accessible to the general public, coming up with a valuation for your home is an inexact science. Check out Zillow.com and their patented Zestimate will give you an exact number for your home. That’s not something you can take to the bank for several reasons:
1) Time passes between when you first start thinking about selling and when you actually sell, and a lot of things can happen on both micro and macro levels that affect values. Fortunately, in recently years and especially this year, we’ve seen substantial price increases. This is not unusual, but prices don’t always increase.
2) The online tools don’t know a lot of the aspects of your home that affect the value. For instance, they don’t know about a view, if any. They don’t know about your upgrades like the new kitchen and bathrooms which can greatly increase the value.
3) Conversely, they also don’t know about the kitchen and bathrooms that sorely need updating and may drag the value down.
4) Presentation of the home at the time of the sale can greatly affect the value, but positively and negatively. For instance is the home vacant, staged and inviting? Or is it occupied and cluttered with a tenant who makes showings a challenge?
There is another factor that can greatly affect your valuation, and that is the competency and abilities of the agent representing you in the sale. Not all real estate agents are created equally. As part of our contracts we all have the fiduciary duty to honesty, loyalty, integrity and the utmost care in our relationships with our clients. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I’ve seen some agents fall short in one or more of those areas.
Here are just a few of the balls I’ve seen dropped by agents:
1) Not using professional photography and drones when beneficial. Visuals are everything online, it’s the bait that attracts the fish and gets them hungry to visit, or it can turn them off.
2) Weak property descriptions can be a detriment to the marketing of the home. My previous broker Melissa Bradley used to preach, “accentuate the positive (and eliminate the negative)”. That’s not just a marketing anthem, those are words to live by.
3) Being a jerk, I know of other agents in Marin who won’t work, or are hesitant to work with other agents. Being a jerk can make a transaction more difficult, and sometimes it can blow a deal.
4) Overplaying a hand, I’ve heard agents talk about lining up multiple offers and boast about how far they will go over the asking price only to fall short of their expectations. The worst is when they get no offers after playing everything up.
5) Knowing when to reduce the price. You can recommend it too early or late. I’m proud to say I’ve been in situations where I discussed reducing the price of a home with my sellers but held off because of serious buyer interest that led to great offers. I’ve been in deals with more than one agent who has asked my sellers to reduce their prices and we said ‘no’. They let the deals fall apart and we later sold the property for more money.
6) Knowing when to keep a deal together. I’ve also been in plenty of deals where price reductions were warranted and we’ve made concessions because if we went back on the market we might have gotten less than what we would have with the original deal. Price reductions can be challenging to navigate: sometimes people give up too much or too little. I could go on but I think Kenny Rogers put it best in The Gambler:
You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done