Six Pricing Mistakes That Cost Sellers Money

Every seller I meet has a number in their head before I get there. That is normal and it is usually not the problem. The problem is what happens in the eight weeks after we choose one.

The most expensive mistake I see is not accepting too little. It is asking too much for too long, and then taking less than the house would have brought in its first month. One of my own listings did exactly that, and it is in here.

The market you are pricing into

The June figures from the NWMLS, published on July 2, are the most recent we have. Start with how much there is to choose from.

Homes for sale, NWMLS service area

Some of that climb is simply the season. Inventory builds toward summer every year and always has. The part that is not seasonal is the comparison with last June, and on that measure the service area is up 16.4 percent. Here in Snohomish County it is up 29.2 percent, and our median sale price of $725,500 was among the highest of the twenty-seven counties.

Now the part most people get wrong. This is not a market falling over. Closed sales in June were 6,847, up 2.3 percent on June last year and up 10.2 percent on May. Buyers are buying. And by the measure that actually decides who has the upper hand, we are still short of neutral.

Months of inventory, NWMLS service area

So time is still on your side here. What has changed is the price.

Median sale price, NWMLS service area

The median across the service area climbed through the spring and then stopped, sitting at $650,000 in April, May and June. June was 3.0 percent below June last year, when it was $670,000.

One more piece explains a lot of that. Mortgage rates fell to 5.98 percent at the end of February, the lowest since September 2022, and were back up to 6.49 percent by June. Every buyer's maximum came down with them.

Put it together and you have the market this article is about. More competition than last year, buyers who can afford a little less than they could in February, and a median that has stopped rising. None of that is a crisis. All of it means your asking price is doing more work than it used to.

One: pricing off what you need

The mortgage payoff, the down payment on the next place, the number your neighbour got in 2022. Every one of those is real and not one of them is visible to the market. A buyer is not paying your balance. They are paying what your house is worth to them against everything else they can see this weekend.

If the number you need and the number the market will pay are a long way apart, that is worth finding out in your kitchen in July rather than in escrow in November. Sometimes the honest answer is to wait a year. That is a legitimate result of a pricing conversation and I would rather reach it early than pretend otherwise and list anyway.

Two: leaving room to negotiate

This is the one that sounds most sensible and costs the most.

Buyers do not browse. They search, and they search in round numbers. Somebody whose limit is $650,000 types $650,000 into the box, and a house at $675,000 never appears on their screen. It is not that they looked at it and decided it was too much. They never saw it at all.

At the same time you have moved up into the bracket above, where you are being compared with the houses that genuinely are worth $675,000. Yours will not look like the best value in that group, because it does not belong to that group.

The half point that went onto mortgage rates between February and June makes this sharper, not softer. The brackets did not move. The people inside them did, and a good number of them moved down one.

So the padding does not buy you negotiating room. It buys you the wrong audience twice over.

Three: treating the first two weeks as a warm-up

The day your listing goes live, every buyer whose saved search matches your house gets a notice with your address in it. That happens once. It does not happen again when you reduce the price three weeks later.

Those first days are the biggest audience your house will ever have, and the price is the first thing that audience sees. A listing that is right on day one gets the whole benefit of that. A listing that is ten percent high spends its best two weeks being filtered out by the people who would have bought it.

Four: chasing the market down in small steps

Picture a house the evidence puts at $610,000 that goes on the market at $669,000, because the higher number is a nicer number and there is always room to come down.

Three weeks go by and nothing happens. So the price comes off in stages, five and ten thousand at a time, each cut small enough that nobody notices one. Two months later it sells at $610,000, which is where the evidence had it the whole time.

The market never argued. It just waited. The seller got the number the evidence always gave and paid for it with the strongest weeks of the listing.

Nationally this has become ordinary. Redfin found that 35.4 percent of sellers cut their asking price in April, and that those who cut took an average of 4 percent off. The negotiation is not only about the price, either: 46.2 percent of May sales included a seller concession, the highest share for any May in Redfin's records, and about one sale in seven had both a price cut and a concession. Those are national numbers rather than ours, but the shape of it is the same here.

If you are going to arrive at the price anyway, the cheapest day to be at it is the first one.

Five: pricing off the neighbour's asking price

An asking price is an opinion. A sold price is an agreement between two people who both had the option of walking away. Only one of those is evidence.

The house up the road listed at $720,000 tells you what that seller hoped for. What it actually closed at, how long it took and what the seller paid toward the buyer's costs tells you what the market thought of the hope. I will bring you the second kind and show you the addresses so you can go and look at them.

Six: pricing the house you remember

You have lived in it a long time and you have stopped seeing it. Buyers see it cold, and they are pricing the roof, the siding, the deck and the water heater, because their lender and their inspector are going to look at all four.

Out here that list runs longer. Wells, outbuildings, access, easements and how the ground drains all come into it. If you are on a septic system there is a date you need in your diary: the Board of Health adopted an ordinance in April requiring an inspection before any property is sold, and it takes effect November 1. The inspection is good for a year, so a seller listing this summer can have it in hand rather than discovering it in escrow.

What a pricing conversation should look like

I will bring you the sales I used and not just the number I got out of them, so you can argue with the reasoning instead of taking my word for it. I will tell you what I think the house does at three different prices and what each of those costs you in time. Then the number is yours to set, because it is your house.

What I will not do is give you a high number to win the listing and come back in a month asking you to cut it. That practice has a name, buying a listing, and it is a good part of why the second month of so many listings goes badly. If you want the longer version of what I actually do for the money, it is in What Does Your Realtor Do to Earn Their Compensation?

The bottom line

There are nearly thirty percent more homes for sale in this county than there were a year ago, and the median has not moved since April. Your asking price is not an opening bid in a market like that. It is the filter that decides who ever sees the house.

Price it where the evidence puts it and let the market come to you. If you want to know what that number looks like on your place, ask me and I will show you the work behind it.

Market figures and charts from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service: the June 2026 report, published July 2, 2026, and the monthly market snapshots for January through June 2026. National price reduction and concession figures from Redfin, May 19 and June 22, 2026. Septic requirement from the Snohomish County Health Department. This is general information about pricing, not a valuation of any particular property.