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, then taking less than the house might have brought while the listing was still fresh.

One of my own listings taught me exactly how expensive that can be.

The market you are pricing into

When this article was originally published in July 2026, the June figures from the NWMLS were the latest available.

Start with how much there was to choose from.

Homes for sale, NWMLS service area

Active inventory across the NWMLS service area was 16.4 percent higher in June 2026 than in June 2025.

Snohomish County was up 29.2 percent year over year.

Some of that climb was seasonal. Inventory normally builds toward summer.

The part worth paying attention to was the year-over-year comparison, because last June had the same season attached to it.

Meanwhile Snohomish County's June median sale price was $725,500, among the highest in the NWMLS service area.

Now the part people sometimes miss.

This was not a market falling over.

Closed sales in June were 6,847 across the NWMLS service area, up 2.3 percent from June 2025 and up 10.2 percent from May.

Buyers were still buying.

“This was not a market falling over.”

Months of inventory, NWMLS service area

Months of inventory estimates how long it would take to sell the active inventory at the current sales pace.

NWMLS describes four to six months as a generally balanced market.

Snohomish County had 2.74 months in June 2026, still below that range.

So inventory was growing, but Snohomish County was not sitting in an oversupplied market.

Median sale price, NWMLS service area

The NWMLS service-area median sat at $650,000 in April, May and June 2026.

June was 3.0 percent below June 2025, when it was $670,000.

Mortgage rates were part of the pressure buyers were feeling. Freddie Mac's weekly 30-year rate reached 5.98 percent at the end of February 2026 and was back around the mid-six-percent range by June.

For many rate-sensitive buyers, the same monthly payment simply bought less house.

Put it together and you had the market this article was written about:

More competition between sellers than the year before, borrowing costs squeezing buyers, and regional prices that had stopped climbing through the spring.

None of that was a crisis.

All of it meant the asking price was doing more work than it used to.

“All of it meant the asking price was 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 that weekend.

If the number you need and the number the market will pay are a long way apart, that is worth finding out at your kitchen table before the house goes live.

Sometimes the honest answer is to wait.

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 can cost the most.

Buyers search in price ranges.

Somebody whose search tops out at $650,000 may never see a house entered at $675,000. It is not that they looked at it and decided it was too much. Their search may never have put it in front of them.

At the same time, you have moved up into the bracket above, where your house is being compared with properties that may genuinely belong at that higher price.

So the padding does not automatically buy negotiating room.

Sometimes it buys the wrong audience twice.

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

A new listing gets something you cannot completely recreate later: it is new.

Saved searches, portals and MLS-connected tools can alert buyers when a matching property hits the market. Some systems may also send alerts when a price changes later, but a price reduction does not turn a three-week-old listing back into a brand-new one.

Those first days can be your broadest burst of attention.

The price is the first thing that audience sees.

A listing that is right on day one gets the benefit of that fresh-listing window.

A listing that starts well above the evidence can spend its best days outside the search ranges of the people most likely to buy it.

“A new listing gets something you cannot completely recreate later: it is new.”

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 nicer 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.

Two months later it sells near $610,000, which is where the evidence had it in the first place.

The market never argued.

It waited.

Nationally, price reductions became common in 2026. Redfin reported that 35.4 percent of U.S. sellers cut their asking price in April, with an average reduction of 4 percent among sellers who cut.

Redfin also reported that 46.2 percent of May 2026 sales in its data involved a seller concession, the highest May share in its records. Sixteen percent involved both a price drop and a concession.

Those are national figures rather than Snohomish County figures, so they are context, not a local market statistic.

The lesson is simpler anyway.

If the evidence already says you are going to arrive at a number, the cheapest time to have the conversation is before the listing has accumulated market time.

Five: pricing off the neighbour's asking price

An asking price is an opinion.

A sold price is an agreement between a buyer and seller who both had the option of walking away.

Only one of those tells you what somebody actually paid.

The house up the road listed at $720,000 tells you what that seller hoped for.

What it closed at, how long it took and what concessions were involved tells you much more about what the market thought.

I will bring you the second kind and show you the addresses so you can look at them yourself.

Six: pricing the house you remember

You have lived in it a long time and you have stopped seeing it.

Buyers see it cold.

They see the roof, siding, deck, flooring, windows and water heater because their inspector and lender may be looking at those things too.

Out here the list runs longer.

Wells, septic, outbuildings, access, easements and how the ground drains all come into it.

If you are on a septic system, there is another date in the file now.

For Snohomish County closings on or after November 1, 2026, sellers generally need a qualifying septic inspection completed within the previous 12 months and must complete the county's new property-transfer process. A septic system installed within the previous 12 months is exempt from the inspection requirement.

Get that work moving before escrow instead of discovering it against a deadline.

“A sold price is an agreement between a buyer and seller who both had the option of walking away.”

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 different prices and what each one may cost you in time and audience.

Then the number is yours to set because it is your house.

What I will not do is give you a high number simply to win the listing and then come back a month later asking you to cut it.

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

The June 2026 numbers showed the change clearly: Snohomish County had substantially more inventory than the year before while the broader NWMLS median had flattened through the spring.

Your asking price is not just an opening bid in a market like that.

It is one of the filters that decides which buyers ever see the house and how seriously they take it when they do.

Price it where the evidence puts it.

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 from Northwest Multiple Listing Service June 2026 data. National price-reduction figures from Redfin's May 19, 2026 report and concession figures from Redfin's June 22, 2026 report. Septic requirements from Snohomish County Health Department. This is general information about pricing, not a valuation of any particular property.