Selling your home: pricing it right.

Ask ten sellers what their home is worth and you'll hear ten hopeful numbers. But the market doesn't pay for hope — it pays for value it can verify. After fifteen years in cost control and bidding, here is what I've learned about pricing, applied to selling your home.

The overpricing trap

The instinct is understandable: "price high, leave room to negotiate." In practice, it usually backfires. Your listing gets its most attention in the first two weeks. Priced above the market, it attracts the wrong buyers' searches, the showings are thin, and the offers don't come. Then the price cuts begin — and every cut signals weakness. Homes that chase the market down often sell for less than they would have at an honest starting price.

Price is a bid, and bids are built from data

In construction bidding, a number you can't defend loses the contract. The same discipline applies to your asking price. A defensible price is built from three things:

• The benchmark and recent sales. What have genuinely comparable homes — same area, same type, similar condition — actually sold for in the past 60–90 days? Not asked. Sold.
• The market's temperature. The sales-to-active listings ratio tells you whether buyers or sellers hold the leverage this season. You can see the current numbers any time on my Market Stats page.
• Your home's real condition. Buyers pay for what they can see and verify — and discount hard for what worries them.

Spend where it returns, skip where it doesn't

This is where a cost-control background earns its keep. Not all preparation money is equal:

The honest conversation

A good listing agent's job is not to flatter you with the biggest number — it's to show you the evidence, agree on a defensible price, and then market your home so competition can push the price up, rather than time pushing it down. That's the conversation I'll bring to your kitchen table.