Now you and your home are ready to sell, the next step is to price your home to sell.

The first step in this process is to research what homes in Ankeny are selling for. A good place to start is at the Assessor’s office. This is what they call looking for comparable sales. For a sale to be comparable, it needs to be a similar style, age, living space square feet and amenities. The sales are those sold within the last six months and within one mile of your home, this is so the Ankeny home loan can meet with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage guidelines.

Now you have the raw data, you need to analyze it. Take into account current market conditions; are you in a buyer’s or a seller’s market? What is the local Ankeny economy doing, what are the unemployment statistics?

Now you have what homes have sold for, look at what homes are currently on the market. Check out your competition. Where does your home fit in the list? How fast do you want to sell? The lower you price your home on the list, the faster it will sell. This is probably the most difficult step, as a homeowner you are so very proud of your Ankeny home and all you have done to maintain it, so it is important to be as objective as possible.

If this all seems like an overwhelming task, you may want to consider contacting an Ankeny Realtor to perform this for you. This is a CMA or a Completive Market Analysis and most Realtors will do this at no charge. Alternatively, if you wish, you could hire an Appraiser to do a full-blown appraisal value, there would be a charge for that and it varies by market area.

If you are in the Ankeny or Greater Des Moines area, I welcome the opportunity to help you price your home to sell. This is more of an art than an exact science.

Tags: Housing Market, Price

Posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Homes for Sale. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.