If your home is on the market, but you haven’t received much interest, then it’s definitely time to consider lowering your price! This fall has brought on the highest inventory of homes for sale across the country that we have seen in years. This means every home seller has more homes to compete with, and making their home stand out is harder. The market does this every year, and this is why Realtor.com released an article two weeks ago that says The Best Time to Buy a Home is the Week of September 27th to October 3rd. We are in that week right now, and in 2026 this phenomenon is even more intense and is likely to last longer than usual. Here’s why:
- Many of the homeowners who wanted to buy and sell but have held off because they didn’t want to lose their pandemic-era mortgage rates are sick of waiting.
- Some homeowners are also feeling the financial squeeze and cannot hold on anymore, so they want to sell to get out.
- Many buyers are worried. Given the Iran War, fuel, and mortgage rates rising, people are understandably nervous. We saw this really hit in August, and it’s worse now that rates went over 7% in the last few weeks.
- Sellers can mistakenly see what their neighbors sold for back in the spring and they just don’t understand why their home isn’t selling for the same price or higher!
If you need to sell this fall, what do you do?
Those considering selling always need to understand the current market climate, regardless of time of year. If you are considering listing now, in the fall of 2026, then what must be understood is that there is more inventory than at any previous time this year. Supply is now higher than demand, and rates are higher than predicted. Things have rapidly shifted from what the market looked like in spring and that means that you’re unlikely to sell your home for the same price as your neighbor did earlier this year.
In late February, mortgage rates were 5.9% and today they are approaching 7.5% which impacts what buyers can afford. Also, in February, there were about 1.3 million homes for sale nationally compared to today when there are 1.7 million. Inventory will continue to rise until about October 15th.
In the graphic below, you can see this more clearly. In a ‘normal’ market, it’s a sellers’ market at the beginning of the year with fewer sellers than the number of buyers, but by Fall, the number of buyers drops below the number of sellers, and it therefore becomes a buyers’ market. Sellers then become the ones who need to compete and that’s where we are.
If your home isn’t selling and has very few or no private showings, then you need to lower your price! The amount of that adjustment is determined by a few factors.
Get your Price on Target
If you and your REALTOR feel that an adjustment to the list price is necessary to drum up more buyer interest, then do it as soon as possible. Homes that sell fast always sell for the most money. In addition, the vast majority of homes either sell in the first few weeks of being listed or right after an effective price reduction. This graphic below is one we have been using very successfully since 2007.
It’s a great guide for our home sellers and REALTORS to determine if the price is right after a home has been listed for a few weeks.
You can see that if you accurately price your home, you are in the bullseye and receiving strong offers. If not, the areas around the bullseye will tell you roughly how much of an adjustment is recommended.
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- If your home is receiving showings but no offers, somewhere between a 3-5% adjustment should be made.
- If you’re receiving a small number of showings and low online activity, you probably need somewhere between a 6-11% adjustment
- Not getting any showings at all is a red flag that at least a 12% adjustment is necessary. When this happens, sellers are usually the most hesitant to adjust because they just cannot believe no one has even come out to see the house.
Price Brackets
Once you determine the general area that your price needs to be after looking closely at the price targeting model above you need to now think strategically about getting it into a fresh new bracket to ensure that NEW EYES will see your home.
Simply put, lowering your price to the next bracket will expose your home to those people searching within that next price range.
- Real estate websites such as Zillow.com, Realtor.com, Homes.com set up their property search portals with price brackets. The person searching for a home will select the area, the number of beds, baths, and their price range. If your home is currently listed at $899,000, and the target model is calling for a 5% adjustment simply lowering to $855,000 won’t help you that much because that’s not a new bracket. But if you go down $5,000 more to $850,000, you will get wider visibility with motivated buyers looking up to $850,000.
- Talk to your REALTOR about factoring in these brackets when determining your list price. But this is also a key factor if you have been on the market for a while without offers coming in and need to adjust the price.
When Lowering Your List Price Is the Right Move
Lowering your list price may be a difficult decision to make. Home selling, though financial, often feels very emotional and lowering the price can feel like you’re devaluing your largest, and often beloved, asset. However, using this guidance with the target and brackets can take the emotion out of it so that you can successfully move on with your real estate plans. The faster you do it, the better. If you wait, you will add up days on market and make the home sell for even less. The best advice we can give is to reduce the price down to where it should be and give yourself the best chance to out compete with other sellers on the market.
The post Is it Time to Decrease the List Price of your Home? first appeared on Lamacchia Realty.