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If you’re thinking about selling, or you’re sitting on the market already, this is for you.
My job is not to tell you what you want to hear or make this easy for me.
It’s definitely not to slap a pretty number on your house, toss it in the MLS, and pray the universe cooperates.
My job is to stand between what you want and what buyers are actually doing right now and make sure you’re not eating a silent but sizeable carry cost every month while nothing happens.
In the last month, I’ve been inside 25-35 homes with buyers. Actually walking through, listening to what they react to, watching when they start mentally placing furniture versus when they quietly check out and move on.
Some are at your price point, some above, some below, but they’re all competing in the same market you’re about to enter.
Meanwhile, you’ve seen exactly one house in that same window: your own. And while you know it deeply, what you might not see is how it stacks up against the 3-6 other homes on a buyer’s Saturday route when they’re deciding where to put real money and manage real monthly payments.
That’s the gap I live in all day.
Here’s a fresh example in Broomfield’s primo tier. Call it the Primo house. Beautiful place, great neighborhood, big lot, only a few years old, all the builder’s upgrades. These sellers went out 9 months ago at $1.75M and got what everyone says they want: months of showings.
Six months of doors opening and closing, shoes and booties all lined up at the front door every weekend.
What they didn’t get was the only feedback that matters: not one offer. Not even a lowball.
By the time I’m at the kitchen table – it’s an expired listing appointment and I’m being asked what went wrong for six months with the last agent.
Before I can opine, they’re venting: no offers, the agent “isn’t selling the house,” “he’s not calling other agents and selling it to them and their buyers,” and more such like that.
I tell them the truth: in early January 2026, this house is going to clear right around $1.6mm, give or take, if you actually want it sold.
Not $1.75M, not $1.7M, about $1.6M, in line with what buyers are actually paying right now, not what you wish they’d pay.
And at $1.675 or above, the people preapproved and comfortable with payments on a $1.5mm – $1.65mm house will never even see the listing, because they aren’t searching above $1.65mm.
At this point, I lose the listing and I know it……Oh, it went on another week or so of them ghosting me because they didn’t want to hear the truth, that’s cool……
That’s a character question and not a financial decision, and I’m totally fine with that. Them’s the breaks.
Instead of listening to the market, these folks went with Captain Headshot of Broomfield, you know him; the guy with the amazing photo on his card, signs all over town, and expired listings that stretch from here to 14th Street.
Captain Headshot buys the listing at $1.725M. Here he is with the listing agreement and his marketing package.
At this point, and we are now a year in at the wrong price, it still sits, and the carry meter hasn’t stopped running. (roughly $48k out of pocket, as the owners told me their carry ON AN EMPTY HOUSE) was $4k a month.
Here’s the thing: your first two weeks on market are your cleanest shot. That’s when every serious buyer sees you as “new.”
If you come out obviously high and miss that window, you build scar tissue fast, price drops, whispers abound, “What’s wrong with it?”
You never get that new listing halo back.
So, when a seller says, “Let’s start high and see what happens,” what they’re really saying is, “Let’s waste our best two weeks and hope buyers forget.” It’s the stupidest idea in this market, or any market.
Are there rare cases where we might go out a touch high on a truly unique property for a week or two and intentionally pitch it to a different geo demo – luxury buyers from Seattle, San Francisco, wherever, to see if they’ll reach?
Sure.
But in those cases, we already have an agreement with the seller to make a real price adjustment in 10-14 days so we don’t burn the entire first month. Those are exceptions, not the rule.
The rule is: we price where buyers are actually buying, and we present so well (the launch) that the right buyer feels like they’ve stumbled onto something special.
All this work is done before the listing goes live.
That’s exactly what happened two weeks ago at a Table Mesa listing. Two months of prep. Building demand before we ever hit “live.”
Three days of off the hook showings and open houses. Not a circus of multiple junk offers, just the right one on day three: clean, above ask, with a young couple walking around whispering that this was finally the one.
I love seeing that, because I know my sellers aren’t about to go through the aggro of price reductions and, “Why does my house suck?” And: “oh, and Mike, why do you suck too?”
You don’t hire me to cosign your favorite number. And if you haven’t gathered, I don’t do it.
You hire me to see the whole field, tell you what buyers are actually thinking, and build a plan so you get out clean, with maximum money and minimum drama.
And, yeah, with a fair bit of Long Island honesty.
Ask Todd and Casey, or Bob and Marcia; sometimes my bedside manner is a little… East coast? Short? Curt? I like to call it honest.
Because frankly, I don’t have the time to take on business that isn’t aligned with this philosophy.
And you, you’re not supposed to know any of this.
You have your own job, your own lane, your own soccer games and dance recitals.
But we live on this playing field every day, and we get better at it every day because we’re students of it.
Let me know what questions you have.
