如何能让你的房子卖个好价钱

Lynda Nair’s charming Maplewood New Jersey home has a beautiful kitchen, renovated bathrooms and four bedrooms. But when she put it on the market for sale last month at 599,000, she found no buyers, even though her broker Carol Greenberg showed the home 16 times.

“And (there’s) there are lots of kids on this block.”

What to do? Lynda, a divorced mother of two grown children who’s looking to downsize, didn’t hesitate. She lowered her asking price by $20,000.

“Are you confident it’s going to go at this price?”

“Eh… No, not really, because of what the market is now. “

The market in much of the country remains sluggish. Lynda, former realtor herself, understands she needs to be flexible.

“Have you got any calls in the last couple of days?”

She followed Carol’s advice to respond to the market’s message. The original price was too high.

“The buyers are the one who’s going to set the price. You know we could do as much as we can. And when the buyers, when we had 16 showings in two weeks and no offers, what does that say? That says the buyers have rejected this price.”

Most people have an emotional attachment to their home and their neighborhood. But when it comes to selling, realtors say you have to take the emotion out of the sales equation.

By minimizing their emotion, sellers like Lynda can realistically assess what they need to do to make a sale at the best possible price.

“If I want to sell my house and move on, I have to put it where the market says it should be. I don’t have a choice.”

Another key to selling on this market, says Greenberg, is recognizing that buyers hope to get a deal by negotiating the seller down. So sellers have to allow for wiggle room.

“I have an office.”

Lynda Nair says she’s willing to negotiate but only a bit considering all the money she spent on renovations.

“I'm not gonna give that away just because the economy has turned.”

Allan Chernoff, cnn, Maplewood, New Jersey