Selling a home
Everyone calls me DB. I’ve been building and renovating homes since the mid-90s, buying and selling since the early ’80s, and a licensed REALTOR® since 2008. Myriad factors go into a pricing strategy. Here’s how I use listing psychology in marketing, researching and selling homes.
The idea
— Mike Bruce, auctioneer
“Homes and real estate aren’t any different.”
— DB, Mike’s son
As an auctioneer, my dad was masterful at working a crowd, and he knew a lot about helping buyers perceive value and bid. Much of it is nuanced and very subtle, just like when you’re presenting a home for sale.
“Price is based on the purchaser’s worldview and situation, not the producer’s.”
Seth Godin, “Understanding pricing,” November 2024 [1]
Ask any REALTOR® why you should hire them, and nine times out of ten they’ll say, “I get the most money in the shortest amount of time.” Or they’ll go off on some statistic about how great they are. What I’m trying to do is show you the inner workings of why I do the things I do, to back up that claim.
So the question I often get is, how do you get people to compete with each other and drive the price up? Starting from my early education in auctions, it’s very simple. It’s a supply-and-demand marketplace, and as we all know, there are more people than there are homes. We’ve had a shortage of housing for a very long time. Estimates of California’s shortage generally run above 1 million homes and as high as 3.5 million, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.[2] Demand for housing is a real need and often a want, and the two carry a big distinction. Competition is basically the desire to win, to keep the prize out of another competitor’s hands. It’s simply human nature to want to win. Add scarcity, high demand and low supply, a ticking clock, and a group of people who see the perceived value, and I’ll show you a multiple-offer situation.
“In other words, competitive arousal can lead to a ‘win at any cost’ mentality.”
Deepak Malhotra, Harvard Business School, “How to Harness Auction Fever,” February 2005 [3]
So how do we plant the idea of perceived value? Let’s look at the people we’re in business with: first, the person buying your property, and second, all the other listings that are your competition.
Sellers
Selling a property is a milestone and a team effort, regardless of your situation. Here are the three typical kinds of sellers.
Has to / Needs to move
Highly motivated. They just bought another place and can’t afford to carry two notes at once. They lost a job, can’t make the payments anymore, and the bank is going to take the house. Or it’s a relocation due to a job, or a court-ordered necessity to sell in order to cover debts and distribute to the heirs.
Wants to move
Financially okay, and still quite motivated. They want to sell mostly because of a life-changing event: a job change, a redeployment, a divorce, a death in the family, moving closer to grandchildren or family.
Would move for a number
No real motivation. They won’t take any action and will continue living there. Or they’ll list the house at their special number, which is always too high, and it ends up expired or withdrawn.
Whatever kind of seller you are, it comes down to three things: price, marketing and showability.
1 · Price
Pricing correctly, how we land on a number, isn’t something a website like Zillow just spits out. We need comps, a comparative market analysis (CMA), to research the data on the solds, the actives (who our competition is) and what’s currently under contract. We also look at the off-market sales I can find when I pull information from my title rep. Typically, for value, we use valuation models just like an appraiser would.
I keep a tight standard for comps and try to stay inside it. The further out you move in distance or in months, the harder it is to find good comps. I check for variables like solar (rented or paid for), a gym, a home theater, what kind of finishes there are, and whether there’s a pool. Is it on a busy street? Is there a commercial district behind it? Do the comps really reflect the current status of this home? At that point, we extrapolate to compare. There’s no perfect number, so pricing a home properly becomes more of an art form.
Once a buyer sees a home has been on the market for four weeks or longer, they generally assume something’s wrong or the price is too high, and most likely they’re right. Realtor.com’s analysis, reported in June 2026, found homes that closed by the four-week mark sold for 1.8% more than homes that took the average 52 days, and homes on the market 18 weeks or more sold for 1.3% less.[4] Redfin reports that overpricing by 10% or more can add more than a month on the market.[5] Both are national figures.
Price it too low, and you might have a problem: it sets the bar for buyers at a lower starting price. Researchers who studied more than 14,000 home sales in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania found that higher starting prices went with higher selling prices, which they read as anchoring: the asking price becomes the reference point for everything that follows.[6]
Plus, it’s a lot of work for the agent, who can get overwhelmed quickly. Everybody raises their hand and you’re in a multiple bidding war. A home I sold in Westchester in 2020 drew 28 offers in less than a week. It was exhausting. It sold about 15% over its original list price. It was a strong market with COVID on the horizon, so let’s just say there was a lot of motivation. I don’t promise the same result in every market.
Pricing just below what buyers see as the market value feels safer for the seller and helps the marketing, because it still draws eyeballs, attention and interest, which is essentially what you want. Researchers who studied listing prices found the asking price isn’t a ceiling, yet it still steers which buyers search for a home and affects the final price.[7]
A trick my dad used at auctions: he’d call out the price he wanted for the item and say it several times, to prime the bidders’ minds that he thought the value should end up there. If no hands went up, he’d immediately cut the price in half, and five hands would pop up right away. That is how quickly things can go once a buyer perceives a pricing value.
102.8%
The record. On average, the homes I’ve listed on the MLS sold for 102.8% of their original list price. About 71% sold above original list and about 29% below.
Source: my closed sales, checked against public sale records. Each sale’s closing price divided by its original list price, averaged.
So the real question becomes: how do we get there? How do we get to where we want to be? It starts with marketing.
2 · Marketing
All homes are on the internet now, and some aren’t marketed properly. Your price is a huge part of your marketing. So are the photos, the videos, the online presence, the look and the feel. People look online first, before they pick up the phone or text their agent to go see a home.
Three things matter to me. The experience has to be amazing and has to lure people in. The photographs have to be spot on: great lighting, a great setting, staging, the look, uncluttered, depersonalized. And then there’s the walk up to the front door.
I obsess over curb appeal. The walk up, the door itself and the feeling when someone walks through it sell everything. Is the front door sanded and refinished? Are the handles polished? Does the doorbell work? Is the lighting perfect? And what greets them when the door opens? That’s the experience. I want to capture the emotion someone feels when they walk through the front door, because that emotion is what tells a buyer’s mind they have to have it. It speaks to them.
Staging shows how much buyers notice. In NAR’s 2025 staging survey, 29% of agents said staging led to a 1% to 10% increase in the dollar value offered, and 49% of sellers’ agents said it reduced time on the market.[8] Those are agents’ answers, not sales records.
Depersonalization — I don’t want a buyer looking at a home and seeing pictures of the seller, because then it stays the seller’s home. I want buyers to imagine themselves living there: their own furniture, Thanksgiving dinner, where they’ll hang out and watch TV. Where do their guests stay? Is there a gym, a sauna, a spa, a place for wellness? And the kitchen is the heart of the home: where friends and family gather, a place to express love and companionship.
If a property can only be seen by a small percentage of the buyers in the marketplace, I don’t believe that’s truly a free, open market. It’s a seller’s decision to keep a listing private, for whatever reason. But some brokerages encourage private listings, where a home is shown only to that brokerage’s own buyers. eXp Realty, where I am, encourages exactly the open market concept. This October, AGNT, the parent company of eXp Realty, was one of four brokerage groups that announced Open Real Estate, a listing-entry platform, not an MLS, with a target launch in the first quarter of 2027.[9]
In my world, the more buyers see your property, and the more it’s marketed properly, the more demand you have. More demand, scarcity and emotional competition drive prices up. Hence multiple offer situations.
3 · Showability
Scarcity is another major factor with listings. Go to an open house and find two people there. Ho hum. Go to another and find fifteen, and you’re suddenly wondering who in that room you have to beat. It’s obvious: there’s more energy in the room with more bodies. Sometimes that’s as simple as a deadline for offers, or a one-hour open house instead of a five-hour one.
2 people
Easy to wait and see.
15 people
Someone else wants this house.
That scarcity makes people compete.
Everyone should be able to see the home, because that’s part of the marketing, the experience. What we control is when they can walk in. Wide exposure, narrow access.
“And of course, scarcity often creates value.”
Seth Godin, “Fear, scarcity and value,” March 2012 [10]
The cookie study, 1975
People rated the same cookies as more desirable when they came from a jar of two than from a jar of ten. Cookies that were scarce because other people wanted them were rated higher than cookies that were scarce by accident.[11]
A crowded open house tells a buyer that other people want this one.
Agents
California has about one licensed agent for every 97 residents.[12][13] That works out to about 19 owner households for every licensed agent.[14] “Licensed agent” here means anyone with a California real estate license, brokers and salespersons, not only Realtors®.
97
Californians for every licensed agent
19
owner households for every licensed agent
0.67
closed single-family resales per licensed agent in 2025[15]
California had about 271,590 resales of single-family homes in 2025.[15] Spread across about 407,000 licensees, that is about two-thirds of one sale per agent for the year. The business doesn’t spread evenly. In the 12 months to July 2026, BatchData’s analysis found the top 20% of agents did 65.6% of California’s sales volume, 63.6% in Los Angeles County and 64.3% nationwide.[16] Mike DelPrete’s analysis of 2024 national data found about the same: the top 20% did roughly 65% of transactions.[17]
So picture one agent in an area holding 60% of the listings. Everyone else is fighting over what’s left. In my view, the less business an agent has, the more tempting it is to do whatever it takes to get a deal. That’s one reason this industry is regulated. California licensees complete 45 hours of continuing education to renew, with ethics among the required subjects,[18] and NAR members complete Code of Ethics training on a three-year cycle.[19]
It’s a good reason to be careful. Get the best agent for the job.
Why it matters
My take on the psychology of listing might not be for everyone, and I doubt many agents will explain it like this. But it’s important that you’re as knowledgeable as possible when aligning yourself with a good agent, because you’re selling several things. You’re selling the shelter and stability of a home to live in. You’re selling an investment: a property that typically appreciates in value, ultimately building wealth. And you’re selling a human need: family, love and support in a place to call home.
Thinking about selling? Call DB, get a home evaluation, or request a walk-through.
1.
Seth Godin, “Understanding pricing,” Nov 26, 2024. seths.blog/2024/11/understanding-pricing
2.
Public Policy Institute of California, “Housing in California,” fact sheet, September 2026 (statewide). ppic.org
3.
Deepak Malhotra, “The desire to win: The effects of competitive arousal on motivation and behavior,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 111(2), 2010, pp. 139-146. econpapers.repec.org. Interview: HBS Working Knowledge, “How to Harness Auction Fever,” Feb 28, 2005
4.
Inman, “Realtor.com report: sellers’ four-week window,” Jun 11, 2026 (national). inman.com
5.
Redfin, “Stale housing inventory, February 2026,” Mar 30, 2026 (national). redfin.com
6.
Grace W. Bucchianeri and Julia A. Minson, “A Homeowner’s Dilemma: Anchoring in Residential Real Estate Transactions,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 89 (2013), pp. 76-92. More than 14,000 listings in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 2005 to 2009. hks.harvard.edu
7.
Han and Strange, Journal of Urban Economics 93 (2016), pp. 115-130. econpapers.repec.org
8.
NAR, 2025 Profile of Home Staging, May 6, 2025. nar.realtor
9.
HousingWire, Open Real Estate initiative; Inman, Oct 26, 2026, Open Real Estate announcement
10.
Seth Godin, “Fear, scarcity and value,” Mar 5, 2012. seths.blog/2012/03/fear-scarcity-and-value
11.
Worchel, Lee and Adewole, “Effects of Supply and Demand on Ratings of Object Value,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32(5), 1975, pp. 906-914. paper (PDF)
12.
California Department of Finance, E-1 population estimates, Jan 1, 2026: 39,592,978 residents. dof.ca.gov
13.
California Department of Real Estate, licensee count, July 2026: 407,350 (brokers and salespersons). dre.ca.gov. Ratio is my arithmetic: 39,592,978 divided by 407,350 is about 97.
14.
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year estimates, tables B25003, B25008 and B25010, read on Census Reporter. censusreporter.org. Owner households (about 7.70 million) and people in owned homes per licensee are my arithmetic.
15.
California Association of Realtors, December 2025 sales release, Jan 15, 2026: 271,590 closed sales of existing single-family detached homes in 2025. car.org. Per-licensee figure is my arithmetic (271,590 divided by 407,350); it excludes condos, new construction and leases.
16.
BatchData Top Agents Reports, July 2026, share of sales volume, trailing 12 months: California, Los Angeles County, United States. BatchData does not publish its method on those pages, so only the shares are used.
17.
Mike DelPrete, “The top 20% of agents do 65% of transactions,” May 12, 2025 (Cotality data, 2024, national). mikedp.com
18.
California Department of Real Estate, continuing education requirements. dre.ca.gov
19.
NAR, Code of Ethics training for existing members. nar.realtor
