The Dangers of Overpricing Your House in a Down Market

Dave and Jon Flynn break down why pricing high in a declining market can leave you accepting less months later.

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I saw a lot in 23, 24 is you had people want to sell their house.

And the realtor said, let’s seek out this number. I was directly involved in a few of these and said, holy smokes, I wouldn’t be trying to get above market right now because you’ve got a declining market and if you don’t get somebody to pay that premium price you’re looking for in two and three and four months, you could have a completely different market that could be down two, three and 5%, which on an $800,000 house, of course, is far from inconsequential.

That pattern seemed to play itself out a tremendous amount where a lot of the realtors had trouble accepting that we were in a different market than they had seen in most of their career, wasn’t flying up. It was slowly grinding down and that meant different strategies were more appropriate.

Yeah, it’s true. Realtors have been you know, accustomed to, and fine tuned to say the market always goes up because that’s what’s good for business. And you never wanna go back to a house and say, well, it’s worth less. And a lot of times it is the realtors, but a lot of times it’s the sellers too, right.

In fact, and you know, I, outta fairness, I should say, I think that this was more the sellers, but I think the realtors should have been forceful in saying, you’re off here. It’s a different market. If we get caught locking in on that price and don’t get it, we could be looking at significantly less in a few months.

And you were saying people have been trained to say it’s going up, but the marketplace trained them that way too because the market has gone up, up, up for almost ever. And we all became so accustomed to that.

And the corporate training, like it’s all positivity training, right? With when you go into the sales training and, and whatever else. And you can’t go in and like, here’s the reality. But the realtors have, and and it’s hard. I’m guilty too, like sometimes, you know, I’m a people pleaser. I don’t like to let people down and I, I say like, okay, like you guys are like way off.

I’m thinking in my head, but like, maybe if I can put your, maybe if I can tell your house is just a little bit higher than it should be, I’ll, you know, I’ll make you happy. I don’t even, I don’t even want the listing. But again, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to see their reactions when you tell ’em whatever. But, but then you get to the point where you’re just like, no, like this is what.

Your house is worth, you can try it higher, but we gotta have a strategy. So my thing is, I always tell ’em, strategy reduce. We’re gonna reduce it two weeks, we’re gonna revisit it. And that’s what you gotta do. But yeah, the realtors actually costing those people a lot of money by not being honest with them and saying, look. You gotta, you gotta this like, the, the market’s not going up. You gotta go down. Like, this is where we are now. Like, you’re not waiting. If you wait until next year or next spring, like you’re probably gonna get less.

This is what I tell people and it’s true.