If you sold a home a few years ago, we may have priced it a bit above what recent comparable sales were showing... and there was a good reason for that.

From about 2019 through 2024, we were seeing roughly a 10% increase in the median sales price year after year in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.  As a result, when we priced your home, we wouldn't just look at recent comps and stop there. We'd often round up... adding $10K or $20K on top of what those comps were showing.

Why? Because those comps reflected prices buyers had agreed to pay sometimes many months earlier. When a market is appreciating quickly, pricing strictly off of older sales data could mean we would underprice the home relative to what today's buyers would actually be willing to pay.  

Side note - even if you did price your home strictly on recent comps, between 2019 and 2024 you likely would have received multiple offers that would have increased that price for you.

But, things are different now.

Since 2024, price appreciation has slowed down considerably. We're seeing only modest increases now, nothing like the double-digit jumps we got used to. And that, reasonably, changes how we need to approach pricing your home.

In the current market, rounding up from recent comps doesn't make as much sense.  If prices are increasing very slowly, then a comp from three or four months ago is still a pretty accurate reflection of where the market sits today. Adding an extra $10K or $20K on top of that, the way we might have in 2021 or 2022, risks pricing a home above what buyers are actually willing to pay right now, which can lead to a slower sale.

So what does this mean for you?

If you're thinking about selling, we should chat about how we will use comps to arrive at your list price. The strategy that made sense a few years ago (comps, plus rounding up isn't necessarily the right one today. Sticking close to what recent, similar sales are actually showing is almost always the smarter move in the current market.