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In the city of Boulder last month, 871 homes were listed for sale and 210 actually sold.
That means roughly three‑quarters of the people who thought they were “on the market” were really just waiting for something that didn’t happen.
And worse, most of them spent real money cleaning, fixing, staging, and preparing, plus a ton of emotional capital believing they were going to cash a check.
There’s a bid side (buyers and their agents) and an offer side (sellers, pricing, and strategy), and most listings expire because those two never actually meet.
That disconnect is where most of the pain lives.
Back in the bond world, we all had “offer side” customers who never really intended to sell, they’d paint a picture on the offer side on a screen somewhere so they could walk into a client meeting and say,
“Here’s where the market is.” They’d show a bid side to that client somewhere below the price they painted in the street and could buy all they wanted.
And then there were the other guys who lived on the bid side, because they knew where they could actually move size without blowing up the trade.
Price mattered to these guyss, but executable demand mattered more.
Real estate is only a little different. Most listings live on the offer side, a number and a story in the street, a few showings, but no real urgency.
Most agents aren’t willing to tell their sellers where demand is. And since real estate isn’t fungible, agents aren’t trained to have hard conversations. like: No, your house is worth 950k, not 1150k. And no I do not care that your neighbor sold at a 1100k. Yours is smaller, older and no one likes your green kitchen.
Almost nobody in this business is trained to think like the bid‑side customer: “Where is there real, executable demand, and how do we structure this so it actually trades?”
That’s the muscle I use every day.
So when I look at a property, I don’t start with “What do you want to ask for it?”
I start with, “What does the bid side actually support here in the next 60-90 days?”
In a month like December in Boulder, to be one of the 210 that sell instead of one of the 661 that sit, your price, photos, copy, timing, and strategy have to make real buyers and their agents feel like they can’t afford to wait.
My job is to design that launch, to get the bid side off the fence and competing for your house, not just add one more listing to the offer pile.
If you ever want someone to look at your situation (or a friend’s) the way a market person would, not “should we list?” but “what does the bid side actually support here, and how do we tap into it?”.
That’s what I do. I’m happy to walk through it with you, even if the honest answer is “hold what you’ve got for now.”
