If you’re trying to sell a piece of real estate right now, you might benefit from a little bit of sales research performed in the psychology lab, about how people interpret pricing.

Real estate prices Brand Levitra are up slightly from this time last year, but are down from six months ago, which means that sellers need every advantage they can muster. Those trying to sell (or encourage more rental applications) might try a counterintuitive tactic: raising the price slightly.

It turns out that humans aren’t attracted, for a variety of reasons, to price tags ending in zeroes. For example, two-thirds of consumer retail goods have price tags ending with a nine, such as $5.99 instead of $6.00. There is sound logic here; after all, the number on the far left is lower, Tadacip giving the price a visual appearance of being cheaper. And sure enough, plenty of sellers and landlords price their homes in this manner, such as asking $899 for rent, in hopes of attracting more rental applications.

But the phenomenon goes deeper: in one study, where the same product was priced between $15.90 and $15.99, and the surprising find was that the goods sold at $15.97 and $15.99 outsold the other prices, despite being more expensive. This rule came to be known, in the marketing world, as the Rule of 7s and 9s, and most consumer goods are now priced ending in one or the other.

Newer research reveals yet another layer of complexity. It turns out that people prefer precise (and uneven) prices to even ones, as well; for reasons that are speculated by psychologists, but not conclusively explained. Always a shrewd retailer, it appears Wal-Mart has taken this research to heart, pricing their goods at such odd numbers as $7.88 and $4.67.

In one Cornell study, subjects were asked to rate their impression of the cost of various figures, including round figures (such as $500,000) to slightly higher precise figures (such as $501,382). Surprisingly, the subjects rated the prices figures as making a less expensive impression, despite their being higher in actual dollars. The researchers postulated that people are unaccustomed to viewing such high numbers with such precision, leading to them to view them differently.

But what about real-life, actual real estate asking prices and rental amounts? In a study of select Florida and New York real estate markets, researchers found that homes priced with precise figures did, in fact, sell for more than their rounded counterparts, by an average of .75% higher. That may not sound like a huge sum, but that comes out to $3,375 more money on a $450,000 house; I think we could all agree we wouldn’t mind an extra $3,375 check.

So sellers and landlords beware – whatever your high school math teacher may have taught you, integers and round numbers aren’t always the cleanest way of approaching a problem, and if you want buyers and rental applications to line up, try a precise (and perhaps even slightly higher) number when you advertise your home or rental property.

Author Bio: Kevin Kiene manages a website that offers hundreds of landlord forms, including a free rental application form, and a variety of other resources for landlords including a directory of real estate investing clubs and a library of real estate investing articles. Visit EZ Landlord Forms for a full list of landlord resources.

Category: Finance/Real Estate
Keywords: rental application, real estate sales tips, pricing, rental pricing, real estate pricing