For Sale By Owner
The bloom is off the Silicon Valley Real Estate rose specially since early 2015. This does not mean that homes are not fetching multiple offers, but instead of 20 offer, they are getting 5 offers. And these offers are well within the list price of the home. This means that overpricing your home could be very dangerous move.
Case in point is a home on Topping Drive in Los Gatos where the listing agent overpriced the home at $2,998,800 in late July. Within weeks, the agent was forced to drop the price to $2.7M. The list price of the home now is at $2.4M which represents more than 500,000 price decline.
This makes the marketing and pricing of your Los Gatos FSBO home much more critical since you do not want to be chasing the market like this agent on Topping Drive. Every smart buyer is waiting for yet another price drop before they make an offer on this home.
Signs of slowdown in sales are in Saratoga, Los Gatos, Campbell, and San Jose are partially because of the season. Anyone family who was motivated to move because of the school change, have already moved. So, there are less buyers on the market. Also, percentage of cash buyers have dropped to 31% from 41%.
So if your Saratoga FSBO home is not selling, you need to re-consider your pricing strategy. Using the the most recent sales within 1 mile radius of your home that closed in the last 30 days. Using comps that are older than 30 days will result in might higher sale prices which is not an accurate reflection of the current market.
Most reliable way to find your home’s value it to work with a local Realtor who can develop Competitive Market Analysis (CMA) on your home. Your CMA will include qualified sold comps. But the neat part of CMA is that the sold prices can be adjusted for
You could use sites like Zillow, Trulia or Redfin to find sold homes in your zip code. But these sites will not allow you to adjust the prices as you could do with a CMA.
Contact Us if you need help with a CMA.