You are thinking about selling your Orangeville home and as luck would have it your neighbours’ home almost instantly goes up for sale.  You’re curious, as are all of the other neighbours as to how much they are asking.  First stop, Google.  You enter the address and hit the return button and are pleasantly surprised at the list price, you really had no idea what homes in Orangeville were selling for yet alone on your street.  The prospect of listing your home close to that price excites you but you decide you are going to wait and see how the neighbours fare out.

Days turn into weeks and you notice that things have quieted down around the neighbours’ house and the for sale sign remains.  It seems the initial excitement brought people in droves but now only the occasional buyer visits.  Your assumption is that there must be something wrong with the house.  You decide that it’s time to call us here at The Mullin Group and ask us to come out and provide you with a market evaluation because you know that your house is worth a lot more than the neighbours’.  You have maintained your home and added numerous improvements over the years.  If the neighbours’ house is worth what they’re asking, yours is worth much more right?

This is a fallacy that we constantly encounter.  It happens when a seller or potential seller believes that their home is worth the same as, or more than a neighbours’ house that is currently on the market.  Unfortunately, it is a difficult pill to swallow when we have to inform you that nothing could be further from the truth.  Do you know how we determine value on a home?  It has nothing to do with any property that is currently for sale.  It has everything to do with homes that have sold and… it’s not a number we pull out of the air, it’s a number that we estimate that an educated buyer would be willing to pay for your home based on similar homes that have sold. That’s right; it’s the market that determines the value we place on your home.  What other similar properties in your neighbourhood have sold for.  We have to factor in all the similarities and differences and assign a value to each characteristic that either increases or decreases the value based on past sales.

Why is it then that your Orangeville home’s value could be lower than the current list price of your neighbour?  Well, some agents would prefer to take an overpriced listing (sellers desired price) in order to get the listing as opposed to losing out on getting the listing all together.  This often translates into a listing that receives a lot of attention in the first couple of weeks that it’s on the market because it’s new inventory; however, after a couple of weeks of sitting things die down and showings are far and few.  Often times you will notice that the price is reduced or the listing is terminated and a new agent lists it.  If the price remains the same, the pattern continues.  If the home is listed at market price, it sells quickly because it is the price the market determined, not the price the seller hoped for.

On the same topic, we find it funny that many homeowners are misinformed when it comes to what their neighbours’ home actually sold for.  Sellers will often inflate that number or perhaps, like a game of telephone, the numbers get lost in translation.

As Realtors, we have access to all of this information and are happy to provide you with up to date sale prices on similar homes to yours and together we will determine a price that will get your home sold quickly and net you the most we can at the conclusion of the sale.