A homeowner hires an agent to sell a home. That's the assignment, and most of the time, that's exactly how it goes.
Recently, that wasn't the case. A listing didn't generate the activity we expected. We made a price adjustment — the textbook response. The market still didn't respond the way we'd hoped.
The instinct at that point is to lower the price again. It's the path of least resistance, and if I'm honest, it's also the path that keeps a transaction alive. An agent generally gets paid when a deal closes, and there's a quiet pull toward doing whatever keeps that possibility open. That's worth naming plainly, because it's the pressure sitting quietly behind a lot of pricing decisions in this industry.
But the market had already told us something. Not "the price is too high" — more like "there isn't strong demand for this, right now." That's a different problem, and it doesn't have an obvious next move.
So instead of another reduction, I asked a different question: does selling still make sense for this homeowner, right now?
That's not the same question as "what price will make this sell." The first treats the sale as fixed and everything else as adjustable. The second treats the homeowner's actual circumstances as fixed, and asks whether the sale itself still fits them.
It's also a harder conversation than a price change. It means being willing to reopen a plan we'd both agreed to at the start, and being okay with an answer that doesn't lead to a closing.
The homeowner weighed it and decided to withdraw the listing and rent the property instead.
I'm not saying that was the "better" financial outcome — I don't know that, and neither did we at the time. I'm not saying every stalled listing should end this way; most shouldn't. What I am saying is that the decision came from actually considering the alternative, instead of defaulting to another number.
The strategy should serve the homeowner. The homeowner shouldn't serve the transaction.
If your home isn't selling the way you expected, has anyone asked you that second question — or just handed you a new number?
Related reading
How we price a home walks through the pricing method behind these conversations. Preparing to sell covers the work that happens before a number is ever set, and our selling process explains how the plan gets revisited when the market answers differently than expected.
- Pricing
- Strategy
- Trust
- Ethics
- Difficult Conversations
- Client Experience