How to settle on a price?

This has become a challenge in the last month or so, both on the listing side as well as on the buy side of the transaction. Since this is such a heated topic today, I am going to focus first on the listing side and will comment on the sales side in future blogs.
On the listing side it involves the standard practices of evaluating the features and benefits of the home as well as it's shortcomings. The next step is to look at the comparables both in terms of square footage as well as bed/bath/features. By looking at each one of these homes, I normally can gauge where the subject home shapes up in terms of comparison.

The next step is to evaluate the goal of the seller - when do they want to sell? What type of contract do they want to offer on teh home? What are they going to offer with the home? What options are they going to select in terms of how we market the home? Staging? Warranty? Improvements?

In our market here in St Petersburg, we are definitely seeing a market that is not growing in terms of price as it was a year or two ago, but we still have a very limited amount of inventory and land options as well as having one of the most desirable locations anywhere in the US. What does this mean? It means that you can't be greedy and must be realistic in pricing your homes. What I am advising most of my clients now is to price is just below the comps if they want to sell it. Price it to sell at the asking price and don't count on reductions. reductions in this market are not the best option.

More later...