Home selling science, psychology and secrets that will make you huge money!

When it comes to selling your home, everyone wants to make the highest profit they can. To do that, their first instinct might just be to raise the price of their home as high as humanly possible and hope it sells. But in fact, there is a whole hidden science to selling a home, based on mountains of data, copious independent research, and the psychology of perceptions and human behavior.
 We’ll start here with our first five home selling secrets but we have dozens of these from decades of successfully representing home sellers, so stay tuned and of course contact us if you want to find out how to make the most money when you sell your home!

 1.         Start a bidding war
Data shows that the best way to get top dollar for your home is to price it just slightly below market value – or at least on par with your lesser competition. Why does that make sense? By pricing it aggressively, you set up the perfect conditions for a bidding war, where buyers swarm to see the house, their realtor’s push them to make offers, a sense of urgency becomes palpable, and multiple offers ensue, all trying to one-up each other. It takes smart strategizing, the right marketing plan, and an experienced, savvy agent representing you to do this right, but sellers always benefit and maximize their profits when there is a bidding war.

 Remember that human psychology reveals that people are more motivated by the fear of missing out than the hope for gain, which means that they’ll write better offers for higher dollar amounts when they know there is a lot of interest in the listing and they stand to lose a great deal to someone else if they don’t act quickly and definitively.

 2. Make sure you trigger a buyer's olfactory sense.
Research shows that smell has a major impact on if a buyer likes a home or not, and to what degree. In fact, the sense of smell incites memories and the deepest emotional attractions more than any other sense, literally harkening back to our childhood and earliest recollections of family, home, and comfort.

 But of course people can’t really objectively detect their own home’s scent, so ask a neighbor, friend, or your real estate agent to walk through with attentive nostrils and give you an honest assessment.

 There are many ways to get your home smelling great including scented plugins that automatically discharge periodically, a fire if you have a fireplace, fresh flowers, and even baking cookies.

 But no matter what you do, try to keep it simple and neutral. A study conducted by Washington State University found that shoppers will spend 32% more in stores when a simple orange scent is piped in compared to more complex potpourris of orange, basil, and green tea.

 3. Consider not pricing your home with 9’s at the end.
It’s hard not to notice that the price of almost every consumer good or service that’s advertised ends with 9’s these days. We pay $19.99 for a book, $49.99 a month at the gym, and $29,999 for our brand new car. But when it comes to pricing your home, you may want to rethink the “Rule of 9.” That’s because a study by Old Dominion University found that pricing a home with $XZY,999 at the end (like $349,999) can actually be perceived negatively by potential buyers. It seems that in this day and age of marketing and advertising overload, consumers are wary of high-end purchases that purposely try to appear a penny or a dollar less.

 So try pricing your home correctly and fairly without resorting to the $XYZ,999 trick. And don’t worry about getting left out of home searches, because people always input “$350,000 and less” or the equivalent in home search sites, never $349,999.

 4. But don’t price your home a round number, either.
Believe it or not, we’re not finished with the psychology of pricing. Studies show that homebuyers are also weary of homes with prices that are perfectly round numbers, like $300,000. Subconsciously, homebuyers can’t help but perceive this as too arbitrary and amateurish. But research shows that more specific numbers, like $317,000 or $296,500, etc., are seen as fair and accurate professional assessments of the home’s value. In fact, a study by the Columbia Business School found that negotiators who ask for specific amounts are more successful than when they float round numbers.

 5. List your home on Thursday or Friday.
Does it really matter what day of the week you list your home? The data on home selling suggests that it does, as homes that are first listed on Thursdays or Fridays sell quicker and at higher prices than the general 7-day median. The logic behind this is simple – the vast majority of homebuyers go looking for homes on the weekends. So by making your home go active on the MLS (Metro List Services), it appears as a brand new listing as realtors who represent those homebuyers do their searches and send them over to their clients to narrow down the field and get organized for the weekend. So Thursday and Friday listings look like hot new options that just hit the market – which leads the buyers and their realtors to prioritize viewing those homes – and making offers. How much of a difference can this make? Surveys of housing data show that listing your home on a Thursday or Friday could actually yield an average of $2,800 more in a seller’s pocket on a $400,000 home sale.

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Stay tuned for more of these tips and contact us if you'd like more information on making the most money when selling your home.