In this market you will find great deals when it comes to buying a home. If you're outfitted with some information and know how you'll have the edge when it comes to negotiating.
The seller priced the home at $200,000, many home buyers will immediately come up with their offer price without doing any research. Look at comps in the area. You need to work out if the house is below, above, or at market price.
If you discover the home is priced below market price you or your agent should call the sellers agent and see if there are any current or anticipated offers. If there are offers already you could have to go in with a powerful offer and an escalation clause. If there aren't any offers and it’s new on the market, you can test your luck and go in low but give the sellers a short time to respond to your offer. I might suggest only a 24 hour period of time.
If you can get the home seller to sign off on your offer within the time period then you will have the home locked in and block out the other home buyers. Most homes that are price below market in the Seattle area only stay on the market for about a week. If you can put in an offer within the first 48 hours you will have a big advantage. If you wait much longer you will most likely be bidding with another buyer.
If the home is at market price you are going to need to find out how long it has been on the marketplace for. Generally agents like to drop the price about every 30 – 45 days. If the home has been on the marketplace for 29 days with no price change then it might be reasonable to say you can go in at roughly 10% to 15% under listed price. If the homes price dropped within the last week you may have to go in a bit stronger at around 5% under asking. Again it is often good to call the listing agent before hand to check on the activity.
If the home seems to be overpriced then you probably should show the sellers your comps. There are still a lot of sellers that still see their home priced back what it had been a few years ago. If you can’t convince the sellers to come down to market price or below you'll want to track the home. If a seller has to sell the home then they may ultimately drop the price of the home. In many cases it'll sell for a little less than what they may have got if they were not so unrealistic.
The quick lesson of this piece isn't to pay to much attention on the listing cost. You want to run your own comps and come up with what you think the house is worth in the current market. When searching for sold homes attempt to stay with a mile radius of the subject home and use houses that have sold in the last 6 months.
If you are running comps on a condo or townhome try to only look in the same complex. You can use websites that have map searches or feeds to certain properties. If you are in a big city try to be neighborhood specific. There are many great websites for each major city which will have neighborhood specific feeds. For instance if you live in Seattle and are taking a look at Queen Anne Real Estate look only in that neighborhood for comps. Pay attention to square footage and price per sq footage. You can mostly come up with a basic price on sq footage and then add or subtract for upgrades, etc..
Use the Seattle Real Estate Listings site to find Seattle Real-estate for sale in and around Seattle. Scan a list of neighborhood specific properties like Queen Anne Houses, Ballard Houses, Fremont Homes, Wallingford Houses, and other area. View photos, schedule home tours and more.