So do you want to move, or get your price?

If you plump for the latter, you usually get neither.

78 Burning Tree Road has sold for $2.8 million. That’s a good price, for the buyer; it’s a nice house on a good street. The owners initially priced it back in February 2018 at $3.595, which was not an unreasonable decision, based on the town’s appraisal of $3,999,700, but here’s the thing: it didn’t sell.

Rather than acknowledge what the market was saying, the owners kept that price at $3.595 all the way til the middle of June 2019, when they finally dropped it to $3.2 million, and held that price to the bitter end.

It’s not uncommon to overprice a house initially; brother Gideon and I, with something like 50 years combined real estate experience between us, still managed to overprice our mother’s place by committing the cardinal sin of sellers, mixing nostalgia and sweet memories into the pricing formula. But, having made the error, listen to the market and adjust the price accordingly. The faster you do, the faster you’ll sell your house, and often at a better price than if you stubbornly delay.

That said, I think the buyers benefitted greatly from that error, so someone came out a winner,