Smart move

While it’s always wise to avoid letting your house linger on the sales rolls, the current market is sending the immediate price signals that you’d be foolish to ignore or delay acting on.

Coldwell Banker agent Linda Terhune listed 15 Suburban Avenue in Cos Cob at $1.499 on June 7th. Right now, the inventory in that price range is so thin that offers should have come rushing in. When they didn’t (I assume they didn’t — I’m just surmising from the price history here), Terhune quickly cut the price 9%, to $1.395 on June 25th and had a buyer almost immediately. It just closed at $1.390.

This one weird trick: listening and reacting to what the market’s saying works almost every time, in all price ranges, but there are those who cling stubbornly to their price, insisting that “it only takes one buyer” by which they mean, one buyer desperate or stupid enough to pay over-market. Funny enough, that buyer rarely appears.