In my opinion, priced to sell means anything less than fair market value.

My realtor neighbor says "priced to sell" in a listing is a hint to other realtors saying "the owners are mentally at the lowest price they will accept, so don't bother lowballing"

She just sold her house: it was on the market for just over a week. It did not have "priced to sell" in the text.

Who would bother to list a house priced to not sell? (I know it happens, but it's not what they're thinking at the time).

How many ads have you seen proclaiming a property "Priced to not sell!"?

It's meaningless noise, I'd find something useful to say instead -- "Priced 10% below tax appraisal" or some such.

What would the opposite of "priced to sell" be?
"Priced to sit on the market and then end up netting less in the long run because it was priced too high to begin with"?

I also think it is a bit of hype. I love it when I see a listing telling me look quick as it will go soon, then note the stale listing date.
Agents, just write all the positive, the buyer will determine the rest.

"Priced below tax value" means nothing since the tax value has no meaningful relationship with the market value.

Priced to sell to me would mean a very serious seller. In my neighborhood, our small hours are being snatched up by builders and are being torn down and replaced with larger homes.
Some neighbors have put their homes up just "to see" what they could get, with really no plan on selling just yet.

""Priced below tax value" means nothing since the tax value has no meaningful relationship with the market value."

That was an example of something that could be meaningful. In our town tax appraisals are updated annually and surprisingly close to actual sale prices. With some exceptions of course it is a very fair and accurate representation of market value. Around here if your number is far off the appraisal you'd better have a pretty good explanation. In your jurisdiction you'd need to pick something else apparently.

When I see priced to sell in a listing, I find that it generally means that the seller is serious about selling and is listing it at a price that is at the bottom of the market or is a bit more than what you might expect at that price. It does tend to signify that there may not be a lot of room to renegotiate but that is because the seller is already pricing it very realistically.

And - yes- there are plenty of houses out there that aren't really priced to sell. They are priced to negotiate - at best - or priced to hope for an insane buyer - at worst.

We did use Priced to Sell on one house we sold. We had had it listed for 6 months, didn't sell. Took it off the market for a few months, put it back on with a very reduced price where we had very little room to reduce price. My biggest fear was someone would come in and make a ridiculously low offer just because so many houses were selling at a discount. A lot of houses then were selling 10% or 20% below listing price. I didn't want someone think our price was like that and come in offer something really low when we had really priced it already very low. Our price was also in a "lower" price bracket than the old price so we were offering much more for the price than other houses in that price bracket. I felt that "priced to sell" sort of conveyed all that in a shorthand way.

After listing the house we had several immediate showings and had a contract within a few days. The buyers made a very reasonable offer, very close to our listing price.

This post was edited by kats_meow on Tue, Sep 10, 13 at 17:43