Pressure to Lower Prices

Fresh off co-writing an article about how home prices aren’t appreciating as much at the moment, Damon Darlin of The New York Times has an interesting little tidbit on his Times real estate blog, The Walk-Through, about real estate agents getting incentives from their higher-ups for convincing sellers to reduce prices.
Price overcomes all objections. That has been a major topic in our weekly business meetings here. The pool of buyers has thinned somewhat, and there is a little bit more inventory in New York. The suggestion is that if you have exhausted all marketing efforts and it still has not sold, then the price is not right.
If you reduce the price, then at the very least you can get some offers and get an idea of what the property is really worth right now.
The activity with my own listings is telling. I have 19 listings at the moment. 14 of them are in contract. The commonality between those 14 is that the sellers were all amenable to pricing that put them in the bottom 20% of similar properties. Those who wanted higher prices will have to wait and see if that was a good decision.