Among all major jurisdictions in the Washington region, it appears home-buyers and home-sellers in Alexandria are most in line with each others’ thinking.
For the first eight months of the year, the median sales price of homes that went to closing in Alexandria stood at exactly 100 percent of listing price, according to figures reported by Bright MLS as analyzed by the GazetteLeader.
That doesn’t mean that every home did so, but in the broad picture, it seems that sellers in Alexandria are pricing their homes not too high, not too low, but just right.
For the same period in 2022, the sales-to-listing price in Alexandria was 100.54 percent, which suggests the likelihood that competition from buyers may have been more significant last year and sellers had yet to account for it in their pricing strategy.
Of the five most populous jurisdictions across Northern Virginia, only Arlington saw less than 100 percent when it came to the sales-to-list-price ratio for the first eight months of the year, standing at 99.34 percent, down from 100.28 percent a year before.
Among the other three:
• In Fairfax County, the ratio was 101.1 percent, down from 102.29.
• In Loudoun County, the ratio stood at 100.47 percent, down from 102.05.
• In Prince William County, the ratio of 100.51 percent was down from 102.36.
Among other major jurisdictions in the region, the ratio in Montgomery County for the first eight months of the year was 101.24 percent; in Prince George’s County, it was 99.82 percent; and in the District of Columbia, it was 97.66 percent. All three were down from a year before.
In the roughly 90 jurisdictions spread across six states that make up Bright MLS’s Mid-Atlantic catchment area, the ratio of listing price to sales price for the year to date was 99.68 percent, down from 101.18 percent during the same period in 2022.
How to price a listing is part art, part science and perhaps a little voodoo. Some real-estate agents advise their clients to list low to attract attention and perhaps spark a bidding war, although that typically only happens during a hot market. Others suggest listing prices be set aggressively to weed out lookie-loos and focus on serious buyers. Others suggest sellers price right where they think the final total will hit.
