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I

t is important to know what your property is really worth when the time comes to sell. Choose an asking price based on a likely selling price, or, if no realistic asking price is satisfactory to you, then you must question your motives for selling.

The spread between asking price and bottom line is the single most important element in determining not only how long your house will be for sale, but also how much it finally sells for: The greater the spread, the less you might get. A purchaser may not waste time bidding if he thinks the vendor's price is out of line. Conversely, if the asking price is realistic, he must anticipate competition.

You may be tempted to put a high asking price on your house feeling that people will make offers, and there is time enough then to decide what to do. What happens in most of these cases is buyers just don't make offers. People will still visit, and they might even agree that it's a beautiful property, but the best purchasers do not like to be rude, and will decline to make a bid if they feel that the asking price is far from where they see the value. The purchasers who are not shy to be rude may still bid. More often than not, though, your property will simply sit without a bid.

Traffic is slow in recreational property, and the buyers generally come up only on the weekends, and when a house remains unsold, a buyer feels no urgency to act. Eventually such a buyer will even dismiss a house without remembering that it was because the price was too high. He will have simply classified it in a category with the houses he rejected. Your property risks being for sale for a long time without offers, and you may begin to feel discouraged and negative. You may get the occasional low offer, that rude buyer. Eventually you may change agencies, hoping that will help. Finally someone will make a low bid and the agent will express a fear of losing the buyer. She will remind you that all the offers have been in that range, and that therefore that proves the price. It may be that it is the only offer received in two years. You may find yourself making a counter- offer half way between, even though in the past you would have refused to respond at all.

When a property comes on the market for sale, it is an event. When it has been offered for a few years on the market, it becomes more like that old vegetable left over in the back of the fridge. It becomes virtually invisible. If you find yourself in this circumstance, and you have a buyer toying with you at half-price, it is not too late to create an event, and it is as important to the marketing as making the counter-offer is to selling the house. One way to do this is to lower the price to the exact same number as the counter-offer and to tell the agent to make sure the purchaser is told that you have done so. Tell the agent to get back to any previous visitors and tell them as well. Tell previous agencies too, or ask your agent to, if you prefer. The purchaser would like nothing more than to be your only suitor, to go away and let you feel that you really need him. By creating this new event, you are increasing the likelihood that he will have competition, and even if it doesn't generate any, it certainly will underline to the purchaser that your obligation to him is limited to the counter-offer.

Your reaction to this recovery strategy may be that it just creates a new asking price, and could simply generate still lower offers, but fight it and be prepared to take the chance. Your only obligation is to accept the asking price, and making the asking price attractive is going to bring you buyers.

Clients often tell me, as a way of justifying too high an asking price, that they only need that one buyer, but this is not true. You need to create an atmosphere in which the buyer realises that if he doesn't act, someone else will. You need to keep your property on his mind even after he leaves. While you may feel you can depend on its intrinsic beauty and value to do this, it won't stay on anyone's mind if they all feel it is priced way beyond its market value.

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