When the offers stop coming: re-price, improve, or wait, and how to tell which one your listing is asking for
Fewer than two showings a week, showings with no offers, no feedback at all: what the journal does with a listing that has stalled in the northern suburbs.
Noted by Dana Whitaker, editor, towns field bookverified by Marc Ellison8 min read2 sources
The sign went in the ground the second week of March. It is the seventh of April now. The dogwoods are out along Canton Street, the pollen has turned every car in Roswell and Alpharetta the color of a manila folder, and the house has had four showings. Two of them were neighbors.
That is the situation this is written for. Not the house that never should have been listed, and not the one off Crabapple Road that sold in a weekend. The one in the middle, where the sellers have started saying they will not give it away, and the calendar has started to answer back.
Read the showing count, not the days on market
Forget the counter on the listing. FMLS keeps days on market, and it is a lagging number: it tells you where the house has been, not what is happening to it. What is happening is showings per week, and the showing service will hand that over in one page, every request, every confirmation, every time a buyer's agent opened the lockbox on Bethany Bend or Mid Broadwell.
Pull it and count, but subtract the open house and subtract the first weekend, when the sign is new and half the street walks through to see the kitchen. What is left is traffic. Under two showings a week, the house is not being seen by the people who would buy it, and no amount of work inside the house changes that.
Why does a house with no showings never get an offer?
Because the buyer who would pay your number never got in the car. Showing agents work from the same search screen buyers do: a price ceiling, a bedroom count, a school district, a map. A house at $749,000 does not appear to anyone who typed $700,000 as the top of the range, and that range is not a suggestion, it is what the lender approved. That is the whole mechanic. Small reductions do not move you. The reduction has to be large enough to cross a line the search screen draws.
So the first branch is arithmetic. Look at what closed in your subdivision and the two beside it since January, not at what is listed. The FMLS reports print closed prices beside list prices, and the last transfer is also on the county's own record, the Board of Assessors site for Fulton or Forsyth, whichever your address pays. If everything that closed in your bracket closed below your number, you are not waiting for the market to arrive. You are holding a listing the market has already answered.
Showings but no offers: find the word that repeats
Two to four showings a week with no offers means the house is being seen and rejected, and the reason is written down. Feedback comes back through the showing service as a short form, a few dropdowns and a comment box, and agents are brief because they are driving. The brevity is the gift. Read twenty of them in one sitting and look for the noun that appears three times.
In the northern corridor that noun is rarely the price. It is the kitchen, or the carpet on the stairs, or a primary bath that is still a 1990s garden tub, or a deck that faces the neighbor's driveway instead of the trees. One buyer calling the wallpaper loud is taste. Three buyers saying the downstairs is dark is a fact about the house.
What is the difference between a price problem and a product problem?
A price problem is solved with a number and solved in one move. A product problem is solved with money too, but spent differently: new carpet before the next showing, a flooring allowance written into the contract, a credit at closing for the tub, a payment toward what the inspection will find anyway.
The test is who the fix is for. Fix what the buyers named, because you are paying to remove an objection from the next twenty showings. Do not fix what you would want if you were staying, the screened porch or the workshop, because nobody has asked for it and you will not see the money again. And when the objection would cost more to cure than the reduction it would justify, take the reduction. Paint and carpet are almost always cheaper than a price cut. A kitchen almost never is.
No feedback at all means the first showing already happened
Every listing gets two showings. The first one happens on a phone, in about four seconds, and it is a photograph. If the showing report is empty, the feedback is empty and the saved-home count is flat, the problem sits upstream of the driveway: the pictures, the description, or both. The National Association of Realtors' buyer research has put the share of buyers who begin the search online in the high eighties and nineties for years now, which is to say almost everyone meets your house before they meet your street.
Look at your own listing the way a stranger does. The first photo is the front of the house at noon, the flattest light of the day and the hour a west-facing porch turns into a black rectangle. The description opens with a phrase like welcome home and never says what the house is, where it sits, or which high school it feeds. The map pin is where the map put it, not where the driveway is. None of that is the house. All of it is why nobody has walked it.
What a stalled listing costs per month
Add four lines. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey prints a weekly average every Thursday, and at a rate in the mid sixes every $100,000 borrowed costs about $630 a month in principal and interest. Against your own payoff, that is line one. Then the county tax bill, which on a Fulton or Forsyth address is 40 percent of fair market value times the millage. Then hazard insurance, which does not care that the house is empty. Then the utilities a vacant house still burns: power, the water base charge, the lawn.
For most sellers here that total lands within shouting distance of the mortgage payment itself, month after month, and it does not pause while you decide. The second cost is quieter. FMLS prints the original list price beside the sale price, so pull last year's sales in your own subdivision and look at the ones that took more than sixty days. The distance between their first number and their last is the price of waiting, and the journal's read of those reports is that the wait is rarely the cheaper of the two.
There is a third cost this month. Closings in the northern suburbs bunch in late spring and summer, because families buying in Alpharetta, Milton or Johns Creek want to be moved before the school year starts, and the FMLS reports carry that shape every year. A listing that stalls in April is stalling inside its best window. The same listing in October is a different conversation, and a worse one.
Re-price, improve, or wait: try them in that order
A reduction is the fastest lever and the only one that reaches buyers who had already stopped looking, since a price change notifies every saved search watching the neighborhood. Improving comes second, and only against the objection buyers actually named. Waiting comes last, and it needs a reason and a date attached, or it is just the absence of a decision. Waiting until the house on the corner closes is a plan. Waiting is a monthly payment.
Waiting is right when the comps two streets over have not closed yet and you have real reason to think they support you, or the item buyers keep naming is already scheduled for the twenty-second, or the house is tenant-occupied until June and showing it now is worse than not showing it. Waiting is wrong when the traffic has already come and gone, when the feedback named the same thing three times, when your number sits above everything that has closed in the bracket, or when you have a date you must be out by.
What the journal would do this week
One page, four columns, and an hour on the curb.
The columns: showings this week, the words that repeated in the feedback, what has closed in your bracket since January, and what the house costs you each month to hold. The curb: park across the street at the hour your first photograph was taken and look at the house the way that photograph did. Most sellers see the answer from the sidewalk before they finish the second column.
Then choose one of the three and put a date on it. If it is a reduction, make it cross a line buyers actually search, and make it once. If it is a fix, do the one that was named. If it is a wait, write down what you are waiting for and the day it arrives. The sign is patient. The mortgage is not.
