Featured in Clever's Guide on Why Homes Don't Sell

I was recently quoted in Clever Real Estate's national guide on why homes don't sell — specifically on how to diagnose a stalled listing and how to get real feedback out of showing agents.

You can read the full article here: House Won't Sell? 8 Ways to Get Back on Track

The piece pulls together a lot of agent perspectives, and I want to expand on the part I was quoted on, because it's the part sellers get wrong most often.

Most stalled-listing advice skips the diagnosis

When a house sits, the advice a seller usually gets is "it's the price." Sometimes that's right. Often it's not, and cutting the price on a listing that doesn't have a price problem just sells the same house for less money.

Before you change anything, you need to know which problem you actually have. Four numbers tell you, and your agent can pull all of them in about ten minutes: online views, saves, scheduled showings, and written offers.

There's no universal "good" number for any of these — a view count that's healthy on a $1.4M listing is a warning sign on a $400K one. So don't benchmark against a threshold you read somewhere. Benchmark against reality: pull the comparable active listings in your price band and submarket, and compare your four numbers to theirs.

• Your views match the comps but your showings don't → the listing page is the problem. Photos, or how the home reads online.
• Both views and showings are below the comps → you're in the wrong price bracket. Buyers filtering on price never see you.
• Plenty of showings, no offers → buyers are coming and leaving. That's the price, or something they find once they're inside.

Same symptom, different problems, opposite fixes. The diagnosis has to come first.

How to get feedback you can actually use

The other thing I was quoted on: getting real feedback out of showing agents.

Most sellers hear "they liked it, but they're still looking," which tells you nothing. The problem is usually how the question got asked — a generic "any feedback?" text is easy to ignore, and the buyer's agent doesn't want to be the one to say the price felt high.

Have your agent call the showing agents rather than text them, and ask two specific things: what else did your buyer see that day, and what one thing stopped them from writing an offer here? The comparison question is the useful one — it tells you what your house is actually competing against, not what you assumed from the comps.

And one tell worth knowing: if your agent calls twice and hears nothing back, that silence is usually its own answer. The buyer wasn't interested enough to have an opinion worth relaying.

The full framework

If your listing has stalled, I wrote up the complete diagnostic — when to cut, how much, and when a price cut is the wrong move entirely — here: The Showing Algorithm: When to Cut Your Price

The short version: figure out which of the four problems you have before you touch the price. It's the difference between a reduction that works and one that just costs you money.