Can someone help me here.

We are selling our property but wish to sell it quickly. We want to get people to view it because its a great house with lots of features worth more than the ceiling price.

If we put the property on the market at £159,950 people may think that it's too expensive for the area so they may not want to view it.

If we put the property on the market at 'In excess of £135,000' which is the ceiling price of the property in this location. will people think that its a fair price and arrange a viewing, then see the true value and offer £159,950.

Or put the house on the market for £159,950 offers welcome.

Ahh my brain hurts.

What do people think?

Regards
Nik

why do you want to sell quickly? You should try to sell for as much as possible and be uber confident, even if your not beneath the surface. Just look for posts by the user 'terrified' for an example of worrying too much.

A house is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

If you want it quickly, start with a low asking price.

I'd not "see the value" - I've no idea how much houses are worth. I just see houses I like the look of that I can afford, then I'd buy the nicest one. There's a lot of difference to me between £135k and £160k... especially if I have up to £140k to spend.
If I viewed a house at "in excess of £135k" and wanted it, I'd offer £135.5k, or £136k
I'd assume you want £135k minimum.
I'd be annoyed if I then went up to, say, £140k and you were still saying no.
I'd think/say to the EA "f*cking w*nkers .... I wish people'd stop wasting my time and just tell me how much they friggin' want".
This happened to me once before. I walked away.
When I found out how much it went for I'd have paid that. But I wasn't going to fanny about playing cat and mouse.

At "offers accepted" I'd certainly come and have a look, I'd be bearing in mind what you wanted for it .... so that would be the best bet so far as I would be concerned.

The best way to know what your home is worth is to simply put it on the market for the price that you would want to get for it. Understand that you may be right, you may be wrong - but ultimately your viewers will tell you what they think the house is worth!

Listen to feedback - if you have a lot of viewers and no buyers, then you are probably priced too high.

I would err on the side of pricing high to make sure you get the most value for the house. You can easily lower the price if you are not getting any bites.

You say that the 'ceiling price' for your property in that area is £135k.

I suspect then, that no matter what feature it has, your house is not going to sell for much more than that.

A 'ceiling price' for an area is just that - you could paper the walls in gold leaf and it wouldn't add any value beyond the ceiling price.

I'd put it on at £145k and see what happens.

PS - a word of warning.

I bought a flat in 1988 for £30k. Put it up for sale in the summer of '89 for £49,950 and turned down a cash offer of £45k the next day.

I finally sold it for £40k six months later and considered myself lucky.

I suspect that we are at a similar point in the cycle right now.

Want to make some money?

You can get polite advice on selling your grandmother
HERE: http://www.singingpig.co.uk/forums/ShowThr...D=322713#322713

If you put offers over a certain price, in this market I don't believe you will get a single offer over the asking price. Sealled bids and that sense of urgency to buy a house has long gone.

However the lower headline price may attract more interest. Bear in mind in the small print of some estate agencies agreements is the clause you have to pay the fee if you get an offer at or above the asking price if you are the one pulling out. Therefore I wouldn't pitch it lower than you are geniunely willing to accept.

Does it matter if you have ownership of the UK Land when it comes to pricing. Is this a better option for leasehold than any other market type?

Like Mr Yogi suggested I would put it at £145k

You've got some plaster ceiling roses and dado railings? Bit of original stained glass and a fireplace upstairs? Or you've got 1/2 acre out back?

At the end of the day, put simply it is the market that will dictate what the house is worth.

The price you put it on at should take into account comparable evidence of similar properties sold and for sale.

You are right in thinking that you will not have any viewings if the guide price is too high. Price it at a level which will definately attract people through the door and even in a bear market you may generate competition between buyers and a good price will result. Buyers have more confidence to buy if someone else wants it as well!

This applies to properties at all levels of the market.

If you haven't sold it yet (date of OP) the chances are you won't even get anything like the ceiling price as that is probably blown right out the water now. Seems only older established larger properties in shit hot school catchments are holding up i.e not dropping by much more than 10%, yet.

I had a letter though my door the other day from an estate agent offering to buy my house for cash. they said they covered all areas. I have kept it somewhere as a back up if i can't sort my mortgage out.

Sorry, nearly forgot it says up to 85% of the market value paid in cash. website is repossession stoppers.com

Not sure how they can work out the market value as the prices keep dropping, but there is the link anyway.

It's a tough situation, the local market certainly dictates the "going rate" but as someone esle suggested the competition for the property will play a big factor, for those that have sorted their finances then its perhaps a good time to buy if the price is keen, but adding competition plays on human psychology. Perception of value is key.

Even Better advice: Be careful

"Today's bargain, is tomorrow's market value"

UK House Prices to fall up to 50% / CWR pt.3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G37BhLDJjsA

The buyers are simply not around, certainly in this area, dropping the price does nothing, presentation, marketing, open days, nothing - one person in 9 months - 2 paranoid owners, lol

i sold my house recently.

Can I suggest a similar course of action:

Put it on for your 159 just in case an idiot comes along. Then after 1-2 weeks drop the price to 149. then if still no sale drop after 2 more weeks to 139, then if no sale drop the price to 129, until you reach a point that moving/selling becomes unviable. If something is cheap enough it will sell.

I ended up selling for 55k less than my first asking price which hurt at the time, but now I feel happy and am enjoying watching my ideal house come closer and closer to affordability.

It's nice to find a thread on this site that actually addresses the problems of sellers for a change. At times HPC seems to be inhabited by semi-psychotic individuals who hate everyone and think it their god-given right to buy a house at three times their salary, even if they earn £20K, and irrespective of absolutely basic issues like the attractiveness of the area they want to live in, how much it costs to build a house, the wealth of the economy beyond salary multiples, etc.

Anyway, I agree with the others who've said it is extraordinarily difficult trying to sell a house in this market. It's always been easy to buy, harder to sell, but now so few people can get a mortgage and most people are sitting on their hands waiting to see how far prices fall - so prices keep on falling in ultra-thin trading.

As a result it seems to me that you could drop your price by 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and you *still* won't find a buyer. So there's no need to keep on cutting your price in the hope of finding a buyer - the buyers simply aren't out there, except for the absolute bottom-fishers, and why should you be the mug who sells at a ridiculously low price just to establish that there is in fact a bottom?

So, do you really, really, really need to sell? Are there no other options?

If you do need to sell, and you have more faith than me that there must be a buyer out there somewhere, you just have to go on the current asking price of comparable properties locally. What other method is there? Yes, the extra features may help, as may all the usual methods to prettify the house - do the DIY, makes the front really attractive, declutter, etc - but I wouldn't rely on them to *add* value. You need a buyer.

Don't price it high because people will simply ignore you; don't price it low because everyone is expecting to get at least 10% off the asking price, even if you say you've already taken the 10% off. Buyers are feeling very smug and punchy at the moment, or they have really struggled to get to a position of any affordability, so you need to give them the feeling that they are getting a bargain. You should pitch mid-market and make a song-and-dance about all the features they'll be getting, for the same price as that ordinary house down the road. That way a buyer will choose you over the next house, and you will still get a mid-market price, and be in a position to get on with the rest of your life. Any fall in peceived value will be painful, as will the sense that any time and money invested previously in the house has been wasted, but assuming you are going to become a buyer yourself next, you may be able to pick up somewhere just as good for less money overall - so you're actually ahead!

I am a potential buyer. I am probably what you refer to as a bottom feeder. But as far as I am concerned I am a cash buyer with no house to sell, and I either wait until I find the bottom, or I make offers based on my projection of the bottom. I would be stupid to do anything else.

I am making offers of 30% off peak, or about 20 % off current prices.

The dificulty I am now finding, however, is working out what a house is worth today, let alone the forward projections. The old principles of pricing a house seem to have flown out the window. I have no faith any longer in the price that an estate agent markets a newly advertised house at.

Instead, I am looking up the price that the house sold for last time around on something like houseprice.co.uk (if since 2000) and then using the Nationwide House Price adjuster to arrive at a rough estimate of current house value. If it looks like a house has had a bit of work done to it since the last sale, fair enough, add on a bit. To the extent that there are comparable properties, then great, but I am finding huge disparities in the areas that I am looking at (eg a house on one side of the road at 550k; and the house directly opposite on at 895k).

If I was a seller now, I would be aiming to justify the current price to buyers, be ready to explain why the price is correct at today's levels and what it was expected to have been worth in 2007 (and even include that detail in the marketing brochure).

I know there are quite a few buyers around in my area, but alot of them are like me - not believing the current prices, quite aside from the projected drops. I dont care what an asking price is any longer; it often bears no correlation to the house's true value.

Spot on, dude!

So here's the dilemma, do you cut the price to catch one of the few buyers, or wait. History of the past 15 years would recommend you hold out, but experience in the major downturns is that the first cut is the cheapest. The other fact is once stability is achieved after a period of painful price falls, confidence is so dented that a return to buyers chasing prices takes considerably longer than expected. Buyers can afford to wait until they see evidence that the inventory of propery for sale has been seriously eroded.

The gamble is over time the balance of need to buy will outweigh the balance of need to sell. Many who today want to sell will, in a while, need to sell. The number of buyers is a function of economic fortunes in large part. So it seems to me to boil down to a simple gamble on how fast the economy stabilises - and here the odds seem stacked against you on a strategy of hold out until the buyers' nerve fails. This feels more like a major downturn than a temporary dislocation. The rules of the past decade and a bit don't look appropriate.

Try what these are trying ? -----> http://www.rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails-108...p;mam_disp=true

"THE SPECIAL OFFER ALLOWS FOR ANY OF THESE HIGH SPECIFICATION APARTMENTS TO BE PURCHASED FOR £115,000 (Originally £140,000) PROVIDING CONTRACTS ARE EXCHANGED PRIOR TO THE CHRISTMAS BREAK. CALL US NOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS £25,000 DISCOUNT!!"