Pricing Tricks to Sell Real Estate

Pricing Tricks to Help Sell Your Home

With a growing glut of new homes and resales on the market and buyers on the sidelines waiting for home prices to fall, pricing your home correctly can have a lot to do with how quickly it sells.

To improve your chances of finding a buyer, Jonathan Clements shares several pricing tricks in today’s Journal.

Everyone knows that retailers use the “.99″ trick -– pricing something for $1.99 instead of $2.00 to make it appear less expensive. Home sellers can employ the same strategy, Mr. Clements says. The technique works because consumers naturally see the $1 first in the $1.99 price tag, and think the item is being offered at more of a discount than it is.

He explains that consumers associate “precise” numbers with cheaper items (for instance, a bar of chocolate), and round figures with prestige or more expensive things. That holds even in cases where the precise number is higher: $595,000 conveys luxury, while $595,385 is a steal, for example.

On a related note, researchers from Cornell University found that homes listed with prices ending in zeros sell for less than ones with exact figures: a home listed for $484,700 will sell for about $1,380 more than one with an asking price of $485,000, according to a story published in the Washington Post.