The seller who is most determined to get the highest price is usually the one who ends up with the least. It sounds backwards, so let me explain why it holds so consistently. It begins, almost always, with a number that is not a market number.
It is an emotional one. What the home meant to the family. What they paid, what they spent, what they feel they deserve after the years they spent there. That number is real and human, and I never dismiss it. But it is not the number a buyer, standing in that home with their own life and their own budget and their own set of alternatives, is willing to pay. And the gap between the two is where the trouble starts. The seller lists high to protect that value. And in the opening days of a listing, when attention is at its highest and the best buyers are paying closest attention, those buyers recognise the overpricing and quietly move on. The offers do not come, or the ones that do are waved away as insulting. The early window, the most valuable one a seller ever has, passes without momentum. Then time begins to work against them, and it does so quietly but decisively. Because a home that lingers on the market does not stay neutral. Every week it sits, buyers and their agents notice, and they begin to assume there is a reason, a flaw they cannot see. The home stops being seen as a home and starts being seen as a problem. And so, months later, the seller who was determined to get the most finally reduces the price, under pressure, into a market that now senses weakness. They sell for less. Very often for less than a sharp, confident price would have achieved on the very first day. Here is the paradox at the centre of it. The seller who prices to keep the maximum for themselves invites no one in. The seller who prices to bring buyers to the table creates competition, and competition, not stubbornness, is the only thing that genuinely lifts a price. Reaching for the maximum pushes buyers away. Pricing to win draws them in and lets them lift the number for you. I understand why sellers over-price. It is rarely greed. It is a home they raised children in. It is what they paid, what they spent, what it means. The number in their head is emotional, and it is real to them. But the market does not pay for what a home means to you. It pays for what it is. Wanting more is entirely human. Getting more, in this market, is a strategy, and it usually looks like the opposite of what instinct suggests.