Realistic Price Pays Off In a Cooling Market
If you're thinking about selling a house this fall, keep in mind this real-life real estate parable. It's all about being too greedy at the very moment that your local market may be past its price- growth peak and slowly cooling off.</br></br>The story was related to me in late August by one of the country's top analysts of housing price movements and mortgage trends, Amy Crews Cutts, deputy chief economist at Freddie Mac in McLean.</br></br>Cutts lives in a suburban Washington neighborhood of relatively modest houses of roughly similar ages and lot sizes. Absent major additions or renovations, home values tend to move together within a narrow price band, most recently about $400,000.</br></br>One homeowner, however, decided to move the goal posts. He put his house on the market for $50,000 more than anyone had ever paid in the neighborhood -- $450,000.</br></br>Three months later, he hadn't gotten a nibble, much less a full- price offer. But he still insisted that somehow, somewhere there was a buyer at $450,000.