Asking About Average Sales Price

In our continuing, occasional series on interviewing a realtor, I'm going to talk this time about average sales price as a percentage of list price.

First of all, let's work on some definitions. Let's say you list your home for $400,000. If it sells for $400,000 you've sold it for 100% of the list price. If you sell it for $390,000 you've sold it for 97.5% of it's list price.

If an agent averages those numbers over all the transactions they do, you get average sales price as a percentage of list. It's a number I would ask an agent for when I was interviewing them.

To give you a frame of reference, during the hot sellers market a couple of years ago, it was not at all unusual to have an agent have an average that was over 100%. Obviously, that's not true these days! For February, 2007, the last month for which numbers are available, the average for Fauquier County was 92.76% and for Culpeper County 94.22%.

Ideally, of course, you want an agent whose numbers beat the averages! And you definitely want an agent who doesn't look like a deer in the headlights when you ask them about this. They may not know the exact market numbers for last month for a particular county. But they should certainly know generally where the numbers have been. And they should definitely be able to tell you what their own numbers look like.