CHAPTER 4
WHY IT’S SO EASY TO SELL YOUR HOME FOR LESS THAN IT’S WORTH At a certain point, many home sellers feel like throwing in the towel. “I’m just going to drop the price and get rid of this house,” they think to themselves. Fortunately, reason (usually) prevails. The temptation to “throw in the towel” tends to increase the longer your home sits on the market. It even happens to highly intelligent people. Here’s an example: In 1997, entrepreneurs Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking for a seller for their Internet search engine. They called it BackRub. The two were seeking $1.6 million for the new online portal, and were working a deal with Excite, a popular search engine at the time. The problem for Excite was that BackRub was far too effective a search engine. Users were finding what they wanted and moving off the site too quickly, which would be bad for Excite’s advertising business. Page and Brin cut the price dramatically by more than 50 percent. They offered to sell BackRub for $750,000. (Yep, even geniuses cut their price.) Excite considered the offer, but ultimately balked. There was no deal. BackRub’s co-founders decided to commercialize and release the product themselves. First, they renamed it. They called it Google. Less than 20 years later, Google is now worth roughly $360 billion. Excite was eventually sold to Ask.com. Bottom line: Fight the temptation to drop your price. Just because something isn’t selling does not necessarily mean it isn’t worth the price you’re asking.
11
Powered by FlippingBook