Tips to establish your home’s listing price

Reader question: We are going to sell our home. We asked three agents that were recommended to us by friends and family to look at our home. We wanted several opinions on our home’s value. Each one of them has a different opinion, and there is a substantial difference in their estimates. They each provided many comparable sales and homes for sale, which we do not feel qualified to judge. We don’t want to leave equity on the table, and we don’t want to overprice. What should we do?

Monty’s answer: You are on the right track. While it takes more time and effort on your part to ask three agents, you are substantially increasing the odds of avoiding lost equity and overpricing mistakes. My experience is that the bulk of real estate agents nationwide do not utilize standard appraisal protocols. To hand a home seller a stack of comparable sales data and then declare that your home is worth "X" without detailed justification increases the chances of overpricing or losing equity.

Consider the following steps

• Go back to each agent. You are still considering them, but there are substantial differences in the pricing, and you are not comfortable. Tell them what you need to help clarify these differences. You do not want to share the pricing between agents.

• Ask them to deliver an updated estimate that contains only three comparable sales. Instruct them to pick the best comparables because they are the experts.

• Ask them to place a dollar value on the differences between the features of each comparable they chose and your home. Hopefully, they will all come back with adjusted comparables that are the same style of home as your home.

• Ask them to write down the highest price they think you should expect, and the lowest price you could expect.