Priced To Sell

November 20, 2008

In today’s volatile market, buyers expect to get a great deal when then purchase a home. It’s almost as if they want to be rewarded for being brave and credit worthy. So how do you price your home so that it’s competitive enough to get buyers looking at it, but high enough to allow the negotiating room buyers need so they can assure themselves they purchased the home at a discount?

A while back I showed a home that had been reduced for a quick sale. It was a great deal. The buyer I was working with loved the house and made an offer (90% of list price) on the home. The offer was rejected. When I asked if the buyer would have been happy with the purchase price if the home had originally been listed higher and he’d offered the current list price. The buyer admitted that buying the home at a discount was more important than finding the right house at the right price. He absolutely could not pay full list price for the home, even though the list price was below comparable homes.

It’s difficult for sellers to understand that some of the appreciation they’ve experienced over the last few years has been wiped out. But if a seller has owned for more than about 8 years, he still should have built up enough equity to be able to price well, leave a little room for negotiation and walk away from the table with some profit. Compare profits to what your stock portfolio or retirement is worth, and sellers in most parts of the country are still OK. Yes, there are areas in the country where sellers are upside down in their mortgages, but how many of these sellers have owned for more than 8 years?

So if you’re a seller with enough equity to negotiate, do so with grace and gratitude. Hopefully, you’ll get just a good a deal when you go to buy your next home!

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Local Information for Broken Arrow, OK

Latitude: 36.036305 -- Longitude: -95.783616

Other Area Cities: Claremore Broken Arrow Bixby Tulsa Jenks Owasso

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The name comes from a Creek community who established a new town site in a place where reeds for making arrow shafts grew plentifully. The town's Creek name, Rekackv (pronounced thlee-Kawtch-kuh), meaning broken arrow, was not "official" until the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway company built a railroad which ran through the area. MKT was granted town site privileges along the route. They sold three of the as-yet-unamed sites in 1902 to the Arkansas Valley Town Site company. W.S. Fears, secretary of the company, was allowed to choose and name one of the locations. He selected a site about 18 miles southeast of Tulsa and about five miles north of the thlee-Kawtch-kuh settlement and named the new town site Broken Arrow. From "Visit Broken Arrow 2006" published by the City of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The median income for a household in the city was $53,507, and the median income for a family was $58,891. Males had a median income of $42,397 versus $27,559 for females. -- Source: Wikipedia.com

Oklahoma 2000 Census Population Profile Map

	Broken Arrow	Oklahoma	United States
Population	74,859	3,450,654	281,421,906
Median age	33.3	35.5	35.3
Median age for Male	32.3	33.9	34
Median age for Female	34.1	36.9	36.5
Households	26,159	1,342,293	105,480,101
Household population	74,342	3,338,279	273,643,273
Average household size	2.84	2.49	2.59
Families	21,167	921,750	71,787,347
Average family size	3.18	3.02	3.14
Housing units	27,085	1,514,400	115,904,641
Occupied units	26,159	1,342,293	105,480,101
Vacant units	926	172,107	10,424,540

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