Seasoned agents know that if the list price isn’t right on a home for sale, no amount of promotional marketing – regardless of how beautiful – can overcome it. Today’s buyers are more value-conscious than ever and a recent look at internet metrics indicates that a price reduction might be the best marketing a seller can do.
Beacham & Company launched a page featuring all of the company’s price reductions more than a year ago. Updated every week with new price reductions, the page became one of the website’s most viewed pages almost immediately. This past month, it was the most viewed page on the entire Beacham website and the number of visitors was up more than 250% from a year ago. This despite the fact that the Beacham price reductions page gets no more advertising or promotion than any other page on the website.
The benefits of a price reduction don’t stop with being promoted on the Beacham website, however. Sellers who reduce the price of their home – even by $100 – expose their listing to every potential home buyer or real estate agent who has a saved search in the seller’s price range and area. If those home buyers have opted to receive email notifications of new listings, price reductions or sales that match the buyer’s criteria, then each price reduction potentially reaches (depending on the price range) more than 50,000 possible home buyers each time the list price is reduced.
The National Association of Realtors has conducted studies that consistently demonstrate that if a home is shown 10 times without an offer, it’s a signal from the market that it’s time to reduce the price. No showings can also indicate a home is overpriced. Often, buyers won’t say that a listing is overpriced when asked why they didn’t want to make an offer. The buyer may say they object to a feature of the home that was known to them before the showing rather than tell a homeowner the price is too high. Waiting to reduce the price can lead to a greater loss in value than pricing a home correctly at the time it goes on the market because the listing gets stale, or buyers think there is something wrong with the house.
Beacham & Company sales were up 8.8% in March compared to the same month a year ago while the rest of the market dropped 10.2% according to the Atlanta Realtors Association. Lack of sufficient housing inventory was blamed; the number of homes are the market was down 26.5% in March from a year ago.
