If you are a property owner, and you are aiming to sell your property, two key factors are critical:
1- Choose your real estate agent
2- Price your property correctly
Your success in above two points will determine how successful you will be in selling your real estate property. and how fast of course!
Your Real Estate agent/company should have a track record of selling properties in the area your listing is located. This track record should allow your agent to share with you the most recent sales and the closure price of the most recent transactions. Data in Lebanon is unfortunately not publically available and hence it is of mega importance that you choose a real estate company that can give you such data from its own experience.
Overpricing your property - because a novel real estate agent with almost no track record advised you as such - is a huge mistake. The inexperienced real estate agent is unaware of the price at which transactions have closed simply because he/she has closed very little such transactions if any. The inexperienced real estate agent may have suggested a higher price thinking this would give him/her a better chance of signing the listing with the owner. The end result is catastrophic for the owner of the property as it means that his property will sit for a much longer time on the market.
In the age where all listings are posted online, buyers have a big visibility on the listings offered on the market. We get comments from buyers sometimes "Oh!; this is still not yet sold! We saw it months ago online". This cannot be good at all for the listing! The buyers may assume that there is something wrong with the listing or that the owner is inflexible and hence buyers will refuse to place a serious offer.
After so many showings and offers on the same listing, our real estate agents at JSK Real Estate will sit and have a serious discussion with the owner to explain why adjusting the price of the listing is a must to make it sell. In majority of the cases, the owner finally accepts the price drop. Still, the real estate agent finds it extremely difficult to go back to a buyer that submitted an offer previously (weeks ago) that matches the now-new price and close the deal. The buyers that were previously prepared to offer the price either invested in something else or lost the appetite for this property. Never assume that you can bring back a previous offer that was refused by the owner many weeks later when the owner understood that his list price is high. In majority of the cases, the previous buyer will not come back!
One final note on how agents use the overpriced properties. They show the overpriced property to their potential buyer to convince them why they should buy elsewhere. "See this property! It is similar to the other property I am showing you and yet priced higher by x%". By overpricing your property, you are helping the seller next door to sell faster! You are marketing the competing listings rather than your own listing!!!
At JSK Real Estate, we are experts in our field as real estate agents. We will give you the right advice on pricing correctly your listing to really sell it. List with us!
