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By Alison Rogers
Thursday, March 06, 2008
How do you make an apartment sell really, really quickly?
Well, lots of sellers think you hire a stager to rent you just the right white furniture, or you have a broker open house with caviar and champagne.
But most real estate agents will tell you that as much as buyers love the right furniture and caviar and champagne, they love the right price more.
So if you want to sell in a hurry, you’ve got to price your home in accordance with the market.
In a consistent market, that’s easy—you look at what apartments are selling for, decide where your apartment falls on the scale in terms of benefits (a good view might be worth $50,000 more, a bathroom that needs renovation $15,000 less) and then whack off a couple of percent for speed’s sake.
But what about a discontinuous market?
Take Manhattan right now. Winter was slow. Despite lots of things the newspapers said, prices, statistically, don’t seem to have fallen—it just looks like transactions didn’t happen.
Does that mean if prices went down 5 percent that everybody would buy? Or are buyers waiting for their bonuses to show up in their checking accounts, and that when the money hits prices will be flat? Or up?
It’s hard to say. All I can tell you is that when I brought a new apartment to the market I tried to think like a buyer. “What’s my money worth?”
The apartment I am selling is a two-bedroom in SoHo, where “old” apartments tend to sell around $1,200 a square foot and “new” glitzy apartments can be north of $1,800.
Well, the people who want the newest thing (which is a building called One York) won’t see anything other than that as worth $1,800 a square foot.
So I threw that out as a price comparison.
But what about the people who had been paying $1,200 a square foot for old apartments—would they regard paying $1,200 a square foot for something built in this century as a deal?
My guess was yes, so that’s where I priced it. Of course my fondest hope is to get a couple of parties interested and then to set up a competition that sends the price sky-high.
But even if that doesn’t happen, I should have speed on my side. Certainly the apartment is beautiful—truly sunny, with a chef’s kitchen, abundant closets, two baths and a fireplace. And I’m hoping the customer who can spend a couple of million to live in SoHo will recognize the value of a deal—for the price of something not renovated, you can have the air a different temperature in your living room (where you are taking your Meursault out of your wine cooler to serve to guests) than in the bedroom (where you are overlooking the garden of one of those $1,800-a-square-foot buildings next door).
For pictures, hit my firm’s web site, dgneary.com.
And if you’re one of those “gosh, brokers lie when they say everything is cheap” people, remember this: When you price to sell quickly, you don’t price “cheaply”—you just read what the buyer can buy in this market, and then offer them a little bit of value off that price.
It’s not the perfect strategy for every seller, because some people want to hold out for the last dollar, and they’ve got the leisure of time. The challenge you face, as a seller, is to figure out which kind of seller you are—in a hurry or ready to wait—and act accordingly.
Contact Alison Rogers at DG Neary Realty via e-mail at ali@dgneary.com.
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