A Sellers’ Guide to the Boston Real Estate Market

This blog describes the activities and real estate insights of the brokers and consultants at Boston Realty Advisors, a premier full service real estate brokerage company specializing in the areas of Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, and surrounding areas of Greater Boston, MA and Manhattan, NY.  Postings are related to Boston apartment rentals, residential condos and homes, office space leasing, retail real estate and real estate auctions.  Learn more about the individual voices that will be featured; commercial real estate experts and local residential real estate experts.

Look to the future, not the past.  Home values and their appreciation have settled down over the past few years.  That’s why if you are serious about selling your home, it is wise to work with a successful listing broker with a current track record of a high number of sales in your market.  You want a broker who will provide an honest assessment of your home’s value today and in the near future, not in the past.

Today’s savvy buyers will not only be looking for a home that is competitively priced, but for one that hasn’t topped out of its full potential.  People today know that buying a home will likely be their single most important investment, not just a place to live.  They will be looking for a home that will hold its value and perhaps, with a few enhancements, could even make some money in three to five years.  What does that mean to you the seller?

That means today, you need to offer your home at a price that is too good to pass up.  This is the real estate psychology you need to use today, in order to sell your home.  You want buyers who are afraid not to buy your home, because it is such a great value.

The days of plugging comparable properties into a computer program and having it spit out a competitive price are long gone.  The reason can be linked to using sales data from six to nine months ago in property price comparisons to price your home.  In this market that is detrimental to sellers. Then your property will always be above the market value.

As a seller, you don’t want to chase the market down and always be out of sync with it.  It is better to look at the Under Agreement Price (UAG) and days on the market to truly understand what may be the correct asking price.  UAGs give us the listing price (when the property was put under contract) but not the final selling price, and we have to consider the swiftness of the sale.  It is also a key factor to decoding the current market.

Your listing broker must be a good businessperson, as well as a good broker.  He or she needs to continuously assess a whole list of variables, such as a fast-changing real estate market, important tax effects, Wall Street fluctuations, and current and projected employment data, just to name a few.  You need a broker with a holistic approach to selling.

Finally, home sellers must not look at the sale or purchase price of their home as a one-time situation.  The average homeowner in Boston moves every three to five years.  That is good news, because even if you sell your home today for lower than what you paid, you will also be buying a home at a lower price than it would have been a few years ago.  When the market goes up in the future, there will be another great opportunity to do well.  That’s one of the reasons we advise, “Make sure your home sells: Look to the future.”

Rob Cohen, president of Boston Realty Advisors, is a Boston real estate broker with 25 years of experience in business and real estate.