How are you enjoying rounding off the penny in retail stores? There are a lot of people who do not like this new practice at all. The word is that people find it unsettling as they feel a loss of comfort in knowing exact values. They claim that rounding up or down cash amounts causes anxiety because they need certainty in money transactions.

People who feel this way are being told to just take it easy and relax. The bottom line is that rounding up $1.98 to $2 or rounding down $2.02 to $2 is not that big a deal and they will get used to it. If they find this to be emotionally challenging, then the problem they have is a little deeper than they may think and perhaps some professional help might be in order.

I wonder if we might want to consider the same posture in real estate pricing. Let’s step back for a minute and consider that the average house price in our major urban areas is now in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If a house is $299,999, does it not make more sense to say that the price of this house is $300,000?

I have been told many times that there is a psychological difference between a price that is 99 and one that is 100 but I wonder,…are you sure you about that? As a marketing professional, should you assume that you are smarter than your customer and that by marking the price of $300,000 lower by one dollar you are invoking a clever ploy to attract the customer?  I am just asking.

There is also the suggestion that people search Internet properties by price. A home search restricted to a value up to $599,999 excludes properties that are only a dollar more at $600,000.

Again I have to ask, are you sure about that? Are you making an assumption about the mindset of customers and potential customers?

If a property is marketed at $199,999, why not make it a more logical number of $199,000 or $200,000? Even $199,500 seems more acceptable to me. I may be wrong about this and I will stand corrected by anyone who can give me a logical reason why $199,999 is a price that will make a customer think the person selling at this price is less professional that one who is selling at $200,000 or $199,000.

At the end of the day, I believe pricing a property is all about professionalism. I don’t believe marketing a house that’s marked down by a dollar is well perceived by real estate customers unless it is done with intentional humour to tell customers know, “I know you know this is a ploy.”

I have seen real estate humour done well in marketing, I must give credit where it is due. Many years ago, Bruce Murray, a Realtor with an office on a busy Toronto intersection, put up a sign that said:  “Free coffee with every sale.”

I don’t claim to be an expert on real estate marketing. I am under no illusion that I am. If I was an expert I guess I would be a Realtor instead of a real estate newspaper man and I would be making money.

Heino Molls is publisher of REM. Email [email protected]