What actually determines your price, what’s worth doing before you list, and what to expect once you do.
Selling is a shorter process than buying and a more emotional one. You’re not evaluating houses — you’re being evaluated, and the thing being judged is somewhere you’ve lived.
The sequence
- Find out what it’s worth — properly, from someone who has walked through it.
- Decide what to fix, which is usually less than you think.
- Photograph it well. This matters more than staging and costs less.
- List and show. The first two weeks tell you most of what you need to know.
- Offers and negotiation, where price is only one of the terms in play.
- Inspection, appraisal, close.
What sets your price
Comparable sales, condition, and timing. In that order, and that’s essentially the whole list.
What doesn’t set it: what you paid, what you spent on improvements, what you need to clear to buy the next place, or what your neighbor is asking. Those are all real and none of them are inputs. A buyer is comparing your house to the other houses they can see this month, and that comparison is the entire market.
The market doesn’t care what you paid. Pricing works better once that’s out of the way.
The cost of pricing high isn’t that you sell for less. It’s that you sit. Listings that linger get read as having something wrong with them, and the eventual sale price is often below what a correctly priced listing would have brought in the first month.
Start where you are
What it’s worth
A written range built from the sales that genuinely compare to your house — and an honest account of why the online estimate is off.
Getting ready
What’s worth fixing and what isn’t, which renovations don’t return what you spent, and why photography beats staging.
Downsizing
Selling and buying at once — the sequencing, the bridge financing, and the part nobody plans for, which is the contents.
What I’ll tell you that you might not want to hear
That your renovation won’t return what you spent on it. That the room you’re proudest of isn’t the one buyers will care about. That your timeline is optimistic, or that this isn’t the season for your particular house.
Agents compete for listings, and one way to win one is to agree with whatever number a seller has in their head. It works right up until the house sits for ninety days and you’re cutting the price anyway, having lost the momentum a new listing gets.
I’d rather have the awkward conversation in your kitchen than the worse one in month three.
Start with the number
It costs nothing, it doesn’t commit you to listing, and plenty of these end with me saying you should wait.
