How Fast Can I Sell My Home If I List My Home On The Multiple Listing Service With A Realtor
How fast can I sell my home when I list my home with a realtor you ask?
That depends on many factors. What is the location of the home? Will this be a short sale, or a "traditional" sale? Short sale meaning you owe more than the home can be sold for. Traditional meaning you have enough equity to satisfy the loan and your closing costs.
What is the home's condition?
Are you willing to price the home aggressively?
You'll need to look at the sales price of comparable home sales in the area.
What buyer concessions are you willing to pay? Repairs requested by the buyer, closing costs, buying a home warranty for the buyer, paying their HOA (home owner association) fees in advance - or a variety of other offers you could use to make the purchase more attractive. There are many things a seller can do to "sweeten" the deal and appeal to more buyers.
There is no definite answer as to how quickly you can sell your home, or if this is a buyers or sellers market. However there is a simple a market statistic called absorption rate - this will help you determine how long on average it will take to sell a home. It is a pretty simple formula: Take the number of homes that are currently listed for sale, then divide that by the number of homes that sold in the last month. The result gives us the number of months it will take to get all of the available homes sold if the month homes sold remained constant. As an example: If there were 100 active (for sale) homes on MLS (multiple listing service) and 20 homes were sold last month. The absorption rate would be 5 months in this example (100 divided by 20 equals 5). This is assuming there were no other homes that were added to the housing inventory over that 5 month period.
Now you can easily argue that "more homes will be offered for sale and the rate at which homes will be sold will fluctuate over time." This is a fact, but the absorption rate calculation does provide a quick snap shot of how many months inventory is on available at a specific point in time.
We have analyzed the housing market in York PA during November 2012. The median price in this market was $147,500 according to the local Realtors association, RAYAC. We found that absorption rate fluctuated greatly between different price ranges. Houses priced $1 to $25,000 had an absorption rate of 3 months. Homes priced in the $50,001 to $75,000 had an absorption rate of 10 months. The price range of $125,001 to $150,000 which included the median home price had an absorption rate of 6 months. When you reached the higher end price range of the market, homes priced $350,001 to $400,000 the absorption jumped to 10 months and in the $400,001 and above the absorption rate soared to 17 months.
The absorption rate is not guarantee your home will sell in the above time frame, but it does give you a starting point on what to expect when you are starting the home selling process. Many homes are listed for sale for a six month contract and many contracts do expire without a sale.
As with all information you are bombarded with on a daily basis you want to take the information with a grain of salt. You need consider real estate statistics in smaller chunks. As seen above, the absorption rate "number of months supply of inventory" varies greatly by price range.
About the Author
Chad Eisenhart is a real estate investor in York, Lancaster and Harrisburg PA with http://www.propertybuysellrent.com/ , He has helped many homeowners in difficult situations by offering them cash and other creative financing offers for their homes. Selling a house is a stressful time and sellers are presented with a variety of options. There is no obligation to receive an cash offer for your home or just to speak with Chad about your situation.
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