Why You Don't Want to Accumulate Days on the Market When Selling
Pricing a home to sell is not an exact science. There's some math combined with an inherent sense of the market that listing agents like myself bring to your kitchen table. Part of the inherent sense of the market is knowing how buyers will react if a seller were to pick a list price we know in our real estate guts is just too high to get any action. Your home sits on the market.
Sure, you can make price adjustments later. That's absolutely fine. And eventually, you can find the value were buyers pay attention. But that doesn't mean you are more likely to get that new lower price when you reduce.
You see, the things we hear from the mouths of buyers let us know that accumulating days on the market is bad for your price. Here is a literal example of 
what I'm talking about.
This past weekend, I was out with buyers looking at properties. They found a home that hit all their happy spots. They asked me to run comparable sales to see if the list price was reasonable. The list price, by the way, was about $380,000. When I looked at the area sales, I came to the conclusion, supported by data they could see, that $380,000 was a great value for the home. Then one of buyers said this:
"I completely see where you are coming from with the comps, but that house has been on the market for over two hundred days. As such, I would only go to $350,000."
Mind you, this is a house that started at $420,000, over two-hundred days earlier. That buyer would have no argument if the home were priced at $380,000, or even slightly higher, having been on the market for a week or two, with a lot of traffic coming through....usually evidenced by the amount of business cards on the counter, or the people waiting outside the door when you leave.
Accumulating days on the market is not bettering your odds at getting a higher price. The odds are against you the more days you stack up. This same buyer, who is not at all unusual, thought a home that had been on the market ninety days, was "languishing" on the market.
It is this knowledge of how buyers think, combined with the knowledge that your home is going to get most of its attention in the first two weeks on the market, that helps us advise our sellers when they are about to go too far beyond a targeted price and shoot themselves in the foot.
Getting under contract sooner, rather than later, saves YOU, the seller money in the long run from that buyer x factor. The x that they want to draw through your listing because "there must be something wrong with the house" or the x factor that makes a buyer want a discount because you have spent so much time on the market and, they think, must be getting desperate.
Listen to your agent's reasoning on pricing. If they are like me, they also interact with a lot of buyers as well and know all too well how they think.
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