ADVICE TO SELLERS – Not from me, a Martha’s Vineyard Broker, but from a nationally renowned ‘Expert’.

If you have ever watched the NBC Today Show and their ‘Today’s Real Estate’ segment, then you have listened to the self-professed real estate expert and mogul, Barbara Corcoran who has been in the biz since she was in her early 20’s. Her latest advice to Sellers is as follows – and I totally agree with her.

1) If you have listed your property for sale and it is not selling at the listing price, lowering the price in small increments does not get noticed and never gets attention. It is better to take a one-time big chunk off the price. That will get noticed.

2) If you list your property with a seller agent, stick with them unless they have done something absolutely awful and unethical. Changing agents only serves to confuse the market, and since agents sell 90% of the houses, you don’t want to confuse the agents either.

Here on Martha’s Vineyard, and throughout the national real estate market overall it has been common practice for seller agents to accept overpriced listings.

In some cases seller agents have given unrealistic inflated opinions of value in order to charm the sellers and get the listings. Or even more often, the seller agents let the uniformed and biased sellers price the property contrary to the studied opinion of value offered by the professional seller agents.

I have argued this point with some of my colleagues here on Martha’s Vineyard for years, but I do respectfully – and I do mean ‘respectfully’ understand their point of view. Why do they take an over priced listing instead of walking away from it? Their usual defensive response is, “If I don’t take the listing someone else will.”

Come on SELLERS, get real.

Do you want to sell NOW? Be honest, do you need to sell and cut your loses? If you price your property correctly it will sell, and if you don’t price it correctly just assume that you have not listed it. Matter of fact, the only purpose your property will serve is to help sell comparable properties that are priced correctly.

If you don’t have to sell, relax, sit back and wait. Don’t worry; the market will recover some day soon.