The Home Pricing Conundrum: Increasing Traffic At The Expense Of Reasonable Offers

As a seller, which would you rather have?

• Steady traffic (people looking at your home), with several offers to purchase, but very little room to negotiate.
• Intermittent traffic (people looking at your home), with the hope of a single future offer which you wil likelyl be able to negotiate successfully.
  

This is a very realistic trade off in pricing in the current market in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.  In summary, we've seen the following over the past three years:

• a significant decrease in the number of home sales
• an insignificant change in median prices
• a significant increase in the number of homes for sale.

As a result, a Seller is often faced with the scenario above.  To put some numbers to it --- let's suppose that properties comparable to your home have been selling for $160k.  You could either price your house between $160k and $165k and have little traffic, but room to negotiate, OR price your house between $150k and $155k, and have increased traffic, but very little room to negotiate.

The problem, of course, is that if you price the home lower, you'll see an increase in traffic --- but any prospective buyers making an offer on your home will still want to negotiate down on price.  Best case scenario -- they realize that it's a deal even at asking price, and eventually agree to a selling price very close to list price.  Worst case scenario -- they remain insistent that they should be able to negotiate more in the current market, and ignore the deal they are thus passing up based on other recent sales.

What do you think?  How would you price your home?

Related:  Pricing Competitively, But With Room To Negotiate