Houston real estate is a sellers market right now. What were seeing is a lot of sellers who list their houses expecting to get top dollar and a favorable deal. Unfortunately, sometimes a sellers eagerness to get an amazing return on their investment can cause them to make mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes a home seller in Houston can make is to relist your house for sale.
Relisting your house is what happens when you list your house for sale in Houston, take the house off the market for a time, and then relist it for sale in the real estate market again. To people who arent involved in buying and selling houses every day, this can often seem like a good idea. After all, if you arent getting the kind of offers you want for your house, why not try to take it off the market and relist it when demand for housing is higher?
The truth is, relisting a house and going back on the market is almost always very bad. It sends exactly the wrong message to potential home buyers and their real estate agents. Heres why:
When a house is listed for sale and is then taken off the market, it tells potential home buyers and their real estate agents that something is wrong with the house. They will believe that the home did not sell for its listed price because other potential buyers found something wrong and did not make an offer. Then, instead of simply lowering the price, the house was taken off the market. This makes people suspicious!
Oftentimes, there is a seemingly good explanation for a house being taken off the market and then relisted. Unfortunately for home sellers, that doesnt matter at all to home buyers and their agents. To potential buyers, every explanation will sound like an excuse. Weve seen sellers try everything they can to properly explain their honest motivations for relisting a home. It never changes how buyers react.
If your home is relisted, you will not get strong offers. Thats the hard, simple truth! Its not fair, but buyers see relisted houses as risky opportunities. The only buyers who are likely to be interested will be bargain-hunters. The feeling that a house has been relisted because there is something wrong with it or because you are now desperate to sell is too strong to overcome in most cases. Your house will sell for substantially less than it could haveand thats if it sells at all!
Many relisted homes in the Houston real estate market simply do attract any interested buyers at all without severe markdowns. Even then, slashing the price for your house also sends the message that there is something badly wrong with it! Once your home is stigmatized in this way, it can sit on the market for months and even years.
Ideally, your house should be listed for sale and priced to move, exactly when you want to move out of it. The longer a house sits on the market, the more toxic it looks to potential buyers. People will think its overpriced or fatally flawed. In our experience here at Angel Fultz Realty, $5,000 should not be a deal-breaker when negotiating the price of a house. However, the average price reduction when successfully relisting a home in Houston is a whopping $10,000, no matter your price point. The more expensive your home, the more you may have to reduce the price!
In order to get the best return possible for your home in Houston, relisting a property should not be a consideration. Instead, consult an experienced, licensed Realtor about your options ahead of time. Tell them when you would ideally like to hand over the keys to your property and get your Realtors advice on when to list the property.
Remember, timing is important to getting the best price! When to list a house for sale and how much to ask are not questions the average home seller should try to answer without the help of a Realtor. Thats how people end up making big mistakes like relisting their property!
If you have questions about when and how you should sell your home in Houston, contact us today! We help home sellers get the most money possible when listing their property for sale.
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