Pricing your home
How comparable sales actually work, why the first two weeks matter more than the rest, and what a price reduction signals.
Before you list · 6 min read · reviewed
A comparable is a sale, not a listing
The only reliable evidence of what a buyer will pay is what a buyer did pay. Asking prices tell you what other sellers hope for, which is a different thing and usually a more optimistic one. When you look at the estimate we produce, every comparable behind it is a closed sale, and you can open each one to see the address, the sale date, the distance, and how much weight it carried.
Weighting matters as much as selection. A sale three streets away last month tells you more than one a mile away last year, and our estimator says how much more rather than averaging them and hoping. If a comparable looks wrong to you. It had a finished basement yours does not, it sold to a relative, say so, and the estimate changes in front of you.
The first two weeks are the ones that count
A new listing gets its largest audience in the first ten to fourteen days. Everyone who has been watching that area sees it at once. After that you are reaching only people who started looking recently, which is a much smaller group each week.
This is why an ambitious opening price is expensive rather than merely optimistic. You spend your best audience on a number they will not pay, and by the time you reduce, the people most likely to buy have already formed an impression and moved on.
What a reduction communicates
Buyers and their agents can see price history. A single reduction reads as a seller adjusting to the market. A sequence of small reductions reads as a seller who will keep going, and it invites people to wait rather than offer.
If you are going to reduce, a meaningful move usually does more than several small ones. What counts as meaningful depends on your price band. Enough to bring the home into a different set of search results is a reasonable test.
What we will not do
We do not preselect a list price for you. The estimator gives you a range with the reasoning attached, and the list price field starts empty. A prefilled number is a nudge, and it would be our nudge applied to your sale.
We also do not use anything about who lives in an area. Not school ratings, not demographic composition, not neighbourhood descriptors that stand in for either. Those inputs are structurally absent from the estimator, which is a fair-housing requirement and also, separately, the honest way to value a building.