Is My House Overpriced? How to Read What the Market Is Telling You

There is a home not far from me that has been on the market, on and off, for more than five years.

I appraised it five years ago. I told the owners it was worth somewhere around 1.4 to 1.5 million. They did not want to hear that, and I understand why.
Nobody wants to be told their home is worth less than they hoped. So they went with another agent who put it on at 2 million. It did not sell. They tried again with someone else, still at 2 million. It did not sell. Then it went on at offers over 2 million. Then offers over 2.5 million. Every campaign, for five years, sat in front of the market rather than in it.

It has finally just gone under offer, marketed in the mid 2 millions. Five years to get there.
Here is the part most people miss. In that same time, I sold home after home just a couple of streets away, because buyers who walked through that overpriced house then looked at mine and saw good value by comparison. Fighting the market does not just cost you price. It costs you years.

Price is not an opinion. It is evidence.

Most sellers think pricing a home is about finding the right opinion. Yours, mine, or another agent’s. It is not.

In a shifting market, price is about evidence, and the evidence comes from buyers. Not what you hope the home is worth. Not what another agent promised to win your listing. Not even what I think on the day I walk through. What buyers actually do once the home is live.

And they tell you fast. After two or three weeks on the market I usually know far more than I did on launch day, not because my opinion changed, but because buyers have shown me theirs. Every inspection, every second inspection, every offer, and every bit of silence, it all says something. The trick is being willing to listen.

Over the years I have found almost every home lands in one of three situations.
Situation one: no inspections, no offers This is the easiest one to read, and the clearest message the market can send.

Buyers have seen your home online and decided not to even come and look. It has not made their shortlist. Think about how people buy today. They scroll everything in their price range online, line every home up against each other on beds, bathrooms, block size, shed, side access and condition, then pick a handful to go and see. If nobody is walking through your door, your home has not made that handful.

Here is something a lot of sellers have not caught up to. The first inspection now happens online. People view your home on their phone, and that is where they decide whether it is worth seeing in person.

So your photography, your video and your presentation have to be spot on, because if one of them is weak, buyers scroll straight past and you never even know they were there.

That means no inspections is not always about price. Sometimes the price is fine and the marketing let buyers rule you out before they walked in. I hear this most when I take over a listing another agent could not sell. Buyers tell me they did not really notice the home the first time around. That is almost never something wrong with the house. It is that the price was chasing the market, the marketing did not do it justice, or both. But if the marketing is strong and they are still not coming, then you are simply sitting above where buyers see value.

I had one a while back that we appraised at 1.4 million. The owners did a lovely job getting it ready, so good that I said, let’s be a bit ambitious, put it on at 1.5 and see what the market does. Twenty-one days later we had had almost nobody through and no offers. To their credit, they listened. They dropped it to offers from 1.4. Within eight days we had three offers, and it sold for just over 1.5 million.

Same home. The only thing that changed was that we moved back into the range buyers were prepared to consider, and they came straight away. Testing a
slightly ambitious price for a couple of weeks is fine. Sitting on it for months is not.

Situation two: plenty of inspections, but no offers

This is where a lot of sellers get caught, because it feels close.

People are coming through. The home opens are busy. There is interest. But no second inspections, no real negotiation, no offers. What that tells me is your home has made the shortlist but not the top three. Buyers like it. They just like something else more, usually because that something else is priced better for what it offers.

I took on another listed at 1.6 million. The owners were adamant on that figure, and there was a reason. Their bank had done a desktop valuation, done from a computer without anyone setting foot on the property, and told them it was worth 1.6 to 1.65. So that is the number they anchored to. We put it on at 1.6, and we had people coming through, but not one offer.

I kept telling them the market was talking. First they let me try 1.55, still near the top. Still nothing. It took ninety days before they finally accepted where the market actually was and let me put it on from 1.5. Within a week we had two offers, and it sold for 1.525 million.

Ninety days of stress for a result we could have had in the first month.

And notice where that wrong number came from in the first place: a valuation done off a screen by someone who never saw the home. A computer cannot
see what buyers actually pay for. It gives you a figure that feels official and sends you off in the wrong direction.

It works the other way too. More and more, buyers turn up already armed with a number, from a website or from asking an AI what your home and your area are worth. They come better researched than buyers ever have, and that is not a bad thing. But that number has the same blind spot the bank’s desktop did. It cannot see your block, your view, your shed, or what makes your home different from the one down the road. Part of the job now is showing a buyer what the machine could not, so a figure that was never right does not quietly cap what they are prepared to pay.

Situation three: strong inspections, strong offers

This is where every seller wants to be, and when you see it, you know the price is right.

I had a beautiful home we put on from 800,000. That figure was our honest midpoint estimate of where it would land, and I will be straight with you, I was even a little nervous it might be ambitious. But the owners presented it superbly, the marketing came up a treat, and we ran it through our Select Date Sale® system. We held the first home open on the Sunday and had thirty-eight groups of buyers through. By that afternoon we had six offers. I spent that night presenting them, it was a late one. It sold for 1.003 million, all done inside seven days.

That result did not come from underpricing. It came from presenting the home well, bringing the right buyers together at once, and letting genuine competition do the work. At that point price is not being set by anyone’s opinion any more. It is being set by competition. One buyer negotiates. Several buyers compete. There is an enormous difference between the two, and competition is what produces the results that beat expectations.

The biggest mistake is arguing with the market

The market does not care what you paid for the home. It does not care what you spent renovating. It does not care what another agent promised you to win the listing. It only cares what buyers are prepared to pay today.

At any time there are several thousand homes on the market across Perth, and far more agents than there are listings to go around. When agents are that
hungry for stock, a lot of them will tell a seller almost anything to win the listing, because the trade teaches you to get the listing first and work the price down later.

So sellers get told a big, exciting number, they sign, and then the slow grind down to reality begins. That is not honest, and it is not strategy. It is hope. Hope is a terrible way to sell a house.

The truly expensive part is not even the price. It is where those sellers were trying to move to. While they spent months or years chasing a number their home was never going to get, the homes they wanted to buy kept moving. For the ones who held out longest, the goalposts moved so far that even selling at their dream price would not get them where they were trying to go. They did not just lose time. They lost the plan.

So how do you know if your home is priced right?

Stop asking for opinions and start watching buyers.

If they are not inspecting, the market is telling you something. If they are inspecting but not offering, the market is telling you something. If they are competing, the market is telling you something good. Buyer feedback is not criticism. It is evidence, and evidence beats opinion every time.

There is really only one honest question a seller needs to answer before going to market. Do you want to sell in this market, or do you want to wait for a different one? If your number only works in a market that does not exist yet, then now might not be your time, and a good agent should be willing to tell you that rather than list you and let you find out the hard way over five years. If you do want to sell now, then price it to meet the market, watch what buyers do, and be prepared to move quickly if they tell you to.

My job is not to tell you the highest number so you will sign with me. It is to tell you the truth, and then run the strategy that creates genuine competition for your home, which is exactly what our Select Date Sale® method is built to do. The right price brings buyers. Competition between them is what lifts the result.

Find out what the market is really telling you

If your home is on the market and not doing what you hoped, or you are thinking about selling and want the truth on price before you commit, I am happy to walk you through what the evidence is actually saying and what strategy gives you the best chance of a premium result.

It is free, and there is no pressure. It is backed by our Best Service Guarantee.
Call the office on 08 6254 6333, or get in touch with me directly. Book your free appraisal today.

Truth. Strategy. Sold.

This article is general information based on more than two decades of selling property across the Perth Hills and Foothills. It is not formal valuation or
financial advice. Every property and every market is different, and the examples above relate to specific sales. For a figure you can rely on, get an appraisal
of your own home.

By Brendan Leahy, Naked Real Estate