Setting a price for your home - It's not up to you . .

It's up to the market. Not the fictitious national housing market with the bubble that's about to burst, but your local real estate market, the central Ohio Real Estate market, the house two streets over, the one down the block, the one next door.
If the house next door is an awful lot like your home, chances are excellent that you'll price your home close to where the home next door sold. It's not about what you want to get out of your house, the money you put into your house, the house down the street that sold for a lot more (of course it did, it had a 3 car garage and a finished basement) and it's not about what your mother (friend, co-worker, brother-in-law, friend who once took real estate class) told you to expect.

I hate the I told You So on so many different levels and it happens all the time.
I'm talking about a conversation like the one I had yesterday with a guy who listed with another agent at a list price that was considerably higher (25%) than what I told him his house would sell for (he had asked me to talk to him and give a 2nd opinion because we knew each other well, though he felt obliged to the agent he used). It turns out his house in now in firm contract and at the exact same price I told him it'd sell for six months ago. This happens all the time, not just to me but to other agents I know, the good ones, the nice ones, the ones who tell it like it is.

In the meantime, the listing agent probably got a lead or two from buyers looking at that house, had the sign exposure, the internet exposure, and will receive the commission check in a couple weeks. It's nice to be right but it's even nicer to get paid.
Don't listen to the agent who tells you what you want to hear or comes in with the most money for your house, listen to the agent who can back up what they're saying with simple and direct and relevant market data. Selling your home in Columbus, Bexley, Gahanna, Westerville, Grandview, German Village or Clintonville is a numbers game, not an emotional one.

It's a buyer's market

The local market, in my opinion, seems to have had the wind sucked out of its sails just over the last week or so. There are so many homes out there right now and the pool of buyers seems to have dwindled down to a trickle from the torrent we had all Spring and Summer to this point.
It's difficult to buy a home and be in before school starts at this point and that has a lot to do with it too.
It seems like a lot of sellers tested the market, found there were homes out there for them to buy and put theirs on the market only to find that they can't move it as quickly as they'd hoped.
If you're buying, go for it. The market is on your side.

Top 10 Reasons applicants are "declined" for mortgages

(Borrowed from the Columbus Board of Realtors Web Site)

The primary reasons applicants are "declined" for mortgages include
(1) no credit file (usually because the applicant pays cash and has little or no established credit)

(2) insufficient information in the applicant's credit file

(3) insufficient income

(4) short time on the job – at least two years in the same field are usually required by most lenders

(5) slow pay and/or poor credit history indicated by a low FICO

(6) judgments, garnishments, liens or past bankruptcy

(7) accounts sent to collection agencies

(8) current bankruptcy, which is not discharged

(9) foreclosure and

(10) repossession (usually an automobile or furniture).

No credit or insufficient credit can often be overcome, such as by showing timely payment of rent and utilities. But the other reasons for "decline" are usually more difficult.
Just one negative item on your credit report, such as being more than 30 days late with a payment, which is reported to the credit bureaus, can cause either rejection of a mortgage application, or loan approval at an above-market interest rate.
Of course there are some mortgage lenders who will approve loans to applicants who have these "credit challenges." But such lenders will charge high interest rates to compensate for their very high risks.

The bottome line though, is that in today's age of super-specialized loans, it's difficult to get turned down for a loan. There seems to be a package out there for every buyer. It may be a higher interest rate than the buyer wanted but they are so thrilled they can buy a home, they don't really care--even if it's less of a home than they'd hoped for, it's still their home.