I get a lot of people asking me this question when they are about to put their houses on the market, and I have to say to them, “Stop right there! Why would you want to know something like that?” The reply is usually, "So that we can get an idea on when we might have to move." 

No no no….wrong! That statistic means nothing. It does not mean that if the average selling days are 37 that you are going to sell your home on the 37th day of going to market!

Here’s the thing….the time that any property will sell is somewhere between Day 1 and eternity. It depends entirely on how the property is priced and how it is presented. If both these things are positioned perfectly at the very start of marketing, you will probably get a result on the first day in the present market. Certainly in the first week.

However, if your property is overpriced and not particularly well presented you could end up in the ‘eternity’ category. If it is very overpriced and very unsuitably presented it will definitely end up in the ‘eternity’ category, or, at the very best the ‘we could have got a much better result than this’ category.

This is precisely why agents should not take a flying guess at what a property might be worth, then add 10% and hope that someone makes some kind of an offer!! Houses are worth different amounts to different people depending on how much they like it, how comfortable they feel in it, how many things its got that they need and how they perceive the value.

So the trick is this: make your home as attractive as possible and price it from the bottom up, not the top down. This eliminates the chance of making what could be a very costly mistake.