Price it once: in a market giving concessions on nearly half of sales, an aspirational list price is a tax you pay twice

Sellers paid buyers to close on 46.2 percent of U.S. home sales in May, the highest share for that month in Redfin's records and up from 43.1 percent a year earlier. Nearly half of all sellers wrote a check at the closing table. If you are about to list, that is the number that should set your price, and it is the number most sellers ignore.

The instinct in a softening market is to "test" a high number. List 8 percent over the comps, the thinking goes, because you can always come down. In 2026 that logic is backwards. The market is already handing buyers concessions on almost every other sale. Overpricing does not protect your number. It just adds a second cost on top of the one you were going to pay anyway.

Look at what buyers are actually collecting. Beyond the 46.2 percent concession rate, 15.7 percent of May sales carried both a price cut and a concession, also a record for the month, per Redfin. And there are roughly 47 percent more sellers than buyers in the market right now. Your listing is not a scarce object being fought over. It is one of many, competing against a deep bench, in front of buyers who have been trained by the data to ask for money and usually get it.

The tax you pay twice

Here is the mechanism that punishes the aspirational price. You list high. The buyers who could afford your home filter it out because it screens as overpriced next to sharper listings. Showings thin. Two or three weeks pass with no offer, and now the listing carries the one thing you cannot erase: days on market. Buyers read a high day count as leverage, sometimes as a defect. So you cut. Then, because it is a buyer's market, the eventual buyer still asks for a concession, and you give it, because by now you are motivated and they know it. You have paid twice: once in the price reduction, again in the concession, and a third time in the weeks the home sat.

The disciplined seller pays once. Price to the last sixty days of comps in your own market, budget a concession into your net from day one, and you sell inside the window where your leverage is real.

The window is the first two weeks

That window is short, and it is front-loaded. The first two weeks of a listing are when demand is highest and your negotiating position is strongest, because the home is fresh and no day count is working against you. Spend those two weeks on a number the data will not support and you have spent the only leverage you had.

Florida makes the point concrete. Homes are taking longer to sell across the state. Redfin has metro Orlando going in roughly a month, up from about three weeks a year earlier, and the softer corners are softer still: South Florida's condo market, weighed down by insurance and special assessments, and the Gulf Coast around Naples and Fort Myers, still clearing hurricane-era inventory. Stale homes in a slow market do not command premiums. They get bid as stale.

And the competition is getting sharper, not softer. The mortgage lock-in that kept move-up sellers frozen is loosening: Coldwell Banker reports that 35 percent of the sellers its agents are working with this cycle are giving up a sub-5-percent rate to move. Those are motivated sellers who will price to sell. If your home is the overpriced one on the block, you are handing them the buyer.

The move is to price your home once, to the last sixty days of comps in your own market, not to the 2022 peak and not to your neighbor's aspirational list. Put your net proceeds on paper with a concession already subtracted, so a buyer's ask does not feel like a loss you have to fight. Get the home genuinely ready before it hits the market, because move-in condition is what earns a clean offer in the first two weeks. Test-pricing had its moment. In a market paying buyers to close, the number that sells is the one you get right the first time.

This is a pricing-strategy analysis, not investment or legal advice. Days-on-market figures reflect Redfin's Orlando market data as of mid-2026 as one Florida metro's read; local pace varies across the state.