After going through the process of selling our house I sat down and started thinking about a rational way of determening if one should accept an offer or wait and hope for a better offer.

My thinking resulted in a new analysis tool that I have made available at:
http://www.datawise-consulting.com/analyzer.html?V=oa

Any feedback is welcome.


Tomas,

I know about the law of probability, however, I don't think I have the guts to use the offer analyzer on any of my clients yet. (Maybe if they are engineers?)
When you use current market conditions as a factor, wouldn’t you have to know every local market condition? I would think that a constant tweaking of data would be required to come up with any good decision making results.
And after analyzing all the data, I’d bet the usual seller will look at the current offers $bottom line$ and make a decision based on that, even if the probability meter says a higher offer might come his way. (Do you take type of financing, contingencies etc. into consideration?)

I agree that the tool is geared towards people with an analytical mindset. After a house has been on the market for a couple of weeks, the seller should have a good idea about the average number of visitors/week. I also think that even before the house has been on the market an experienced realtor will have quite a good sense about what kind of traffic to expect in a given market.

I think the value of the tool might be in presenting different strategies and their impact. For example, if a seller insists on wanting to price the house a bit over what a competitive comparison would suggest, the tool can be used to illustrate the effect of lower traffic due to the property being overpriced.

A valuable contribution to the tool would be a model that relates the expected traffic based on how the property is priced compared to similar properties in the area. However, I do not have access to the necessary data to develop such a model.