What a $15K Price Gap Taught One Seller About Patience

A seller called me partway through his listing to apologize, even though he didn’t owe me one. How his sale played out is a good lesson in what patience and pricing look like in a slower market, and it ended well, just later than he’d planned.

Timing your listing still matters. If you follow me, you know I talk a lot about our seasonal selling window. The best months to sell really run from March through July, and that’s the stretch we want to hit. This seller came to me around May and wanted to list toward the start of those last two months of summer, which left us about two months to get the property sold.

Patience is key in this market. Timing matters more now because we’re in aslower market. Homes are sitting a little longer; we’re not seeing multiple offers the moment a listing goes live, and there are fewer buyers out there. In this newer market, pricing matters every bit as much as patience.

Price on numbers, not hopes. We sat down and put together a plan of attack. I went through the numbers, pulled past sold comparable sales, and looked at everything I could get my hands on. Based on all of it, I expected the home to sell somewhere between $425,000 and $430,000.

The seller heard me out, then asked whether we could try $445,000, just because he was curious. That wasn’t too far off, and I’m more than willing to let people try their own thing as long as they’ll listen to me down the road. I told him the same thing I say at every listing appointment: I don’t sell hopes and dreams. I sell off of realistic numbers.

Overpricing can cost your selling window. We listed at $445,000. About five weeks in, we’d had a few showings and no offers when he called me up and said he was sorry. I asked why, and he said he probably should have listened the first time and felt like we’d missed our window. He wanted to bring the price back down to the $430,000 to $435,000 mark I’d originally talked about. He also had work coming up that he needed to get back to, which gave us about three or four weeks to get this done. I told him it was time to get aggressive, so we dropped to $430,000 and watched what happened.

The right buyer may come back. Three more weeks went by with more showings and still no offers. One offer came through, then fell apart around day six, which was a strange twist on its own. We were about to pull the home off the market when I got a call about a buyer who was very interested. They’d first seen the house a week and a half earlier, looked at a bunch of other properties, then came back to this one. After a second look, they made a full offer at $430,000, and we closed 27 days later.

Patience and pricing work together. The seller apologized to me again for dragging it out, and I told him he didn’t need to. Patience in this market is key, and pricing the home where it needs to be is the other key. We were on the market for roughly three and a half to four months, made one price adjustment along the way, and stayed patient. The seller was happy, the buyer was happy, and everything closed, even if it took him a little longer to get there.

Listen to the numbers. If I give you a number, or your agent does, heed it. Those numbers aren’t grabbed out of thin air. They come from data we’ve been collecting for months and months, all aimed at getting real prices for real people. Things will still happen in this market, even if it takes a little time.

If you’re thinking about selling or buying in Jacksonville and want a pricing plan built on real numbers, give me a call at 904-650-3890, email me at matty@pursuitrealestate.com, or visit mattymillerrealestate.com. I’m happy to walk through the numbers on your home with you.