Most sellers price by looking at what similar homes nearby are listed at. It feels like research, and it is the single most common way a home ends up sitting unsold for months. Listings are asking prices: they record what other sellers hope to get, including the ones who are also wrong. Price against them and you inherit their optimism.
Asking is not a transaction
A listing becomes evidence only when it ends in a sale, and then the evidence is the sale price, not the advertised one. Until that happens a listing tells you one thing reliably: that at this price, so far, nobody has bought. A home listed for five months at a given figure is evidence about that figure, just not the evidence its seller intended.
What to price against instead
In rough order of how much weight each deserves:
- Completed sales of genuinely comparable homes: same locality, similar floor, similar age and condition.
- How long those homes took to sell, which says whether the market is absorbing stock or stalling.
- Listings withdrawn unsold, which mark a ceiling rather than a level.
- Current asking prices, last, read as competition rather than as valuation.
Comparable means more than the same number of bedrooms. A fourth-floor flat without a lift, a north-facing unit, or one with a decade of deferred maintenance is not comparable to an otherwise identical home with none of those things, and buyers price those differences precisely even when sellers do not.