$1,000,000 or $999,900? How We'd Price a Hudson Luxury Listing

$1,000,000 or $999,900? How We'd Price a Hudson Luxury Listing

By Mike Ferrante, Broker Associate, The Mike Team at LPT Realty

If you're selling a luxury home in Hudson, there's a decent chance someone has suggested a price that ends in 900. $999,900. $1,249,900. It feels like smart retail psychology. In real estate search it works against you, and here's why.

How buyers actually find a Hudson home

Nearly every buyer starts online, either on a consumer site or through an MLS search their agent builds. Both ask for a price range, and buyers pick round numbers. Nobody sets a maximum of $1,049,900. They set $1,000,000, or $1,100,000, or $1,250,000.

Now look at what a charm price does. A home listed at $999,900 shows up for the buyer searching up to $1,000,000. It does not show up for the buyer searching from $1,000,000 to $1,500,000, and that's often exactly the buyer a Hudson seller wants. Price it at $1,000,000 and it appears in both searches.

When I teach this to agents, I use a $199,900 house versus a $200,000 house. Depending on how buyers set their ranges, the charm price can cost a seller something like 30% of the online searches the house could have appeared in. And buyers don't behave differently when two homes are $100 apart. Nobody chooses the $999,900 house over the $1,000,000 house because of the difference.

Every field in the listing is a search filter

Price is only the most visible field. If a field exists in the MLS, someone is searching on it, and luxury buyers get specific: acreage, garage spaces, a first floor primary suite, square footage. Leave square footage blank and the house reads as zero, which drops it out of every minimum-size search. The school district and city fields matter too. A lot of families shopping Hudson are filtering for Hudson City Schools specifically, so those fields need to be checked by a person, not auto-filled from a county record. When I teach listing agents how to enter data, this is the section they never want me to end.

Photos decide whether anyone clicks

Once your home appears in a search, the first photo decides whether a buyer opens the listing. Our approach is to lead with the single strongest image, follow it with the three best features of the house (the kitchen, the primary suite, the back of the property, whatever they are for your home), then arrange the rest the way a buyer would walk through it. We caption photos so someone touring online from out of state knows which floor they're looking at. Luxury buyers relocating to Hudson often tour online long before they tour in person.

The Hudson detail: no city inspection, so the buyer's inspection sets the tone

Unlike many Cuyahoga County communities, the City of Hudson doesn't require a municipal point of sale inspection. That's convenient, but it means the buyer's private inspection is the main independent look at the house before closing, and on a large home those reports run long. A seller who has serviced the HVAC, cleaned the gutters and handled the small items gives the inspector less to write and the buyer less to renegotiate. One exception to know about: if the property has a private septic system or well, Summit County Public Health requires an inspection of that system before transfer.

Round numbers are credible numbers

There's one more reason I like a round price. $1,000,000 says, here's what we believe the home is worth. $999,900 says, here's a trick. Luxury buyers and their agents have seen every trick there is. A clean price backed by comparable sales and a well-prepared house starts the negotiation from credibility.

If you're thinking about selling a Hudson home, we'd be glad to walk you through how we'd price and present it. Reach The Mike Team at www.21mike.com, call +1(216)373-7727, or find us on Google.