Pricing a Home in Costa Mesa from Both Sides Now!
When it comes to the reality of pricing a home in Costa Mesa, it’s natural that buyer’s and seller’s points of view reflect their different roles and objective. In a way, they are mirror images of each another.
From the seller’s point of view, pricing their Costa Mesa home starts out from the reality check of the “comps”—the prices registered in recent comparable neighborhood sales. From there, the pricing decision revolves around the tradeoff between maximum asking price versus the desire for a speedy sale. Even if there is no time pressure at all, serious sellers will still set the asking price below a level that indicates disregard for current market realities. Rather than communicating “this place is worth more than what people are willing to pay,” overpricing only serves to needlessly put off buyers and their agents. If time pressure is an issue, experienced sellers will peg the asking price just enough below neighborhood comparables to make the value evident. Tagging “motivated buyer” on the listing can attract attention, but the right price cuts to the chase. That’s a tactic bound to draw timely offers—especially when a Costa Mesa property is in A+ showing condition,
For most prospective Costa Mesa buyers, it’s the mirror image. Rather than starting from the reality of neighborhood comps, the pricing of their future home begins as an abstraction: the “looking” range. The top of the range will be a figure that is derived from what is comfortably affordable rather than what that figure will command in the current market. Once the serious house hunt is underway and some area properties have been visited, that top-of-range number will almost always need some adjusting—usually (but not always) upward.
Thereafter, when some desirable Costa Mesa properties have been located, pricing from the buyer’s perspective is apt to become largely an exercise in deconstruction. Even though a home is actually desirable, it’s hard to resist zeroing in on the property’s weak points, turning flaws into subtraction fodder for mental offer calculations.
In a successful transaction, the mirror images of buyers’ and sellers’ approaches to home pricing do ultimately wind up converging. That’s another area where having a knowledgeable Costa Mesa Realtor® on your team is invaluable. When it comes to offers and counter-offers, whether you’re a buyer or seller, having your side of the negotiations handled by an experienced professional is a sure way to keep the other side tethered to reality. Arriving at a bottom line reflecting realistic and lasting Costa Mesa real estate value is what most often winds up bringing both parties to a happy conclusion. The first step? You guessed it: call me!
