A useful technique is to think of home prices in terms of “brackets”. $150,000 to $200,000 might be a bracket in your market. For others, this may only be a $25,000 change instead of $50,000. Either way, buyers will typically be looking in their bracket. They may browse outside of the bracket, but, they will  look in their bracket. This is something that should be easily conveyed to a seller. Here are some good examples of bracketing:

No matter which of these sites you would use or even if a buyer was to use a site like realtor.com where you actually enter exact numbers, it’s still going to be a bracketed number. Okay, so what’s the point of going through the idea of bracketing? Well, if you have that listing I talked about above for $329,000, do you really think a price reduction of $10,000 is going to get you more showings? How many more buyers are going to see that home at $319,000 than saw it at $329,000? Few if any. If you are going to get more or even just new buyers to view that home, you are going to need to get the price at or below $300,000 (think buyers looking from $250,000 – $300,000 vs. $300,000 – $350,000).

As for whether or not $499,000, $499,900 or $500,000 is a better price, I don’t think there is any difference between the first two numbers, but, I do think there is a benefit to $500,000 over the other two numbers. Again, think about bracketing again here. If you are searching homes for sale in Atlanta on my website, the brackets go to the even numbers. That means two different brackets will get to view that listing at $500,000 instead of one bracket if you list at $499,000 or $499,900. If that’s not reason enough, if you have enhanced listings on realtor.com (and yes, they are valuable – but that is for another post), the listings are typically displayed from highest to lowest so my $500,000 listing will be viewed more frequently than your listing at $499,900 listing.

To summarize, it’s always better to price at even numbers, but, if you can’t price at even numbers, at least price at something different. If you are in an area with competing listings and there are several homes at $499,000 then list yours at $495,000. t least it will stand out from all of the others at $499,000. While a pricing strategy like these will not by itself sell a home, it can get you the needed traffic that leads to an offer.

Real Estate Statistics

Another example is here where I have put together some numbers and added them in to my new Atlanta real estate market statistics page on my website. There are lots of available flash graphs – some are free, some you pay for and some have free and paid versions. I’ve been playing around with several different ones for a while before I decided to use the ones that I am using, FusionCharts. Check out their free flash charts and there is lots of documentation to go along with them, but, it is much more information than we need to put together some great looking graphs for real estate so I’ll summarize here.

Let’s Get Started

To get going, you need FTP access. Download this file to your computer and unzip it. Create a folder in your root directory named “FusionCharts” and a subfolder named “FusionCharts” to hold all of your swf files. Upload the swf files (found in the “Charts” folder) to your FusionCharts subfolder of FusionCharts. Create another folder under the main FusionCharts folder and name it “Data”. Upload Data.xml to your “Data” folder and you have everything you need to replicate this chart. Your “Data” folder is where you will upload all of your XML files. Do not be scared because I said XML!

Pulling it all together

What you have now is a FusionCharts folder, a subfolder with all of the swf files and a seperate data folder containing your XML files. Your next concern will be only that you make sure that the path to these files is correct because all you need to do now is copy and paste this into a post:

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<div width="520">
<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" width="500" height="500" id="Column3D" >
         <param name="movie" value="/FusionCharts/FusionCharts/FCF_Column3D.swf" />
         <param name="FlashVars" value="&dataURL=/FusionCharts/Data/Data.xml&chartWidth=500&chartHeight=500">
         <param name="quality" value="high" />
         <embed src="/FusionCharts/FusionCharts/FCF_Column3D.swf" flashVars="&dataURL=/FusionCharts//Data/Data.xml&chartWidth=500&chartHeight=500" quality="high" width="500" height="500" name="Column3D" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
      </OBJECT></div>

So, your variables here are the .swf chart style that you want and the data (XML file) you want to use to pull your data from into the chart. Check out your different chart styles by opening the folder on your computer “Charts” and click on the files to see the different options you have available for styles and types and don’t forget to read the documentation here for more complex graphs. Also check your Contents/ChartSS folder for examples with XML data that you can save as your XML file and alter as necessary for your purpose. The only other thing that I had to do to make this work in both Internet Explorer and Firefox was to place the chart inside a “div” container. That’s really about it to get started. If you play around with it, let me know what you think and post a link in the comments.
 

For al ittle background info on how you can use wordpress to create a site like this, take a look at the page I wrote about it here. This one probably wouldn’t be the best thing to involve yourself in for a first project, but, I will try to get one done and available to download when I have some time. I’m helping someone out west set one up now, but, he is a friend and it will be good practice before I go live with a site that I don’t have the kinks out of for you to download. If your really interested in it and you really like it, leave a comment below and i can try to workl it out.