The journal · Issue 27
What we got wrong
We priced a flat too high in March. Here is what it cost.
Seven weeks on the floor, eleven hours kept, not one offer.
A cut of €140 000 that should have come in the third week, not the seventh.
The owner has read this piece and asked us to publish it with her flat named.
We put 31 rue Saint-Dominique on the floor on 14 March at €1 950 000. It was a good flat — 118 m², third floor, two windows onto the courtyard and a kitchen somebody had spent money on properly. The owner had bought in 2011, wanted to move to Lyon in the autumn, and had been told a number by two other desks before she came to us. Ours was the middle one, which is the number I want to talk about.
I arrived at it the way advisors usually do: three comparable sales in the same three streets, an adjustment for the courtyard aspect, a small addition for the kitchen. What I did not do was weigh the two comparables that had themselves taken five months to sell. I used the prices they eventually achieved and ignored the time it took them to achieve it. That is the whole of the error, and it is not a subtle one.
Eleven buyers saved the home in the first fortnight and four asked for an hour. I kept all four. Three of them said a version of the same thing in the room, which I wrote into their reports that evening: the flat was worth what we were asking, but not more than the two others they were also seeing that week.
The three comparablesDays we did not weigh
rue de Verneuil · 112 m²€1.88 m154 drue de Grenelle · 121 m²€2.02 m149 drue du Bac · 109 m²€1.79 m38 dTwo of the three took five months. We used their prices and not their months — and rue du Bac’s €1.79 m is what this flat finally fetched.Nobody said the price was wrong. They said it was not better than its alternatives, which is a different sentence and a more dangerous one — it does not ask you to move, it only tells you that you will not win.
By week five the saves had stopped arriving and no new hour had been asked for since the ninth. I wrote to the owner on 18 April to say that April is quiet in the 7th. That was true, and it was not the reason. The honest letter would have said: three buyers have now told me the same thing and I have not acted on it.
By the fifth week we were the only people in the building who still believed the price.
We cut to €1 810 000 on 4 May, with a letter she signed the same day and nine buyers told within four hours. Two of the original four had bought elsewhere by then. It went under offer on 22 May and sold on 14 June at €1 790 000 — 2.4 % under the cut and 8.2 % under where we started.
Two things changed afterwards, both dull. Every comparable now carries its days-on-floor beside its price, on the sheet the owner signs. And when three reports carry the same sentence, the desk head sees it without me raising it — reports are read across, not only down.
The ledgerThirteen weeks · 14 March to 14 June
“You told me the truth in June. I would have liked it in April.”
Comments5
Sophie Marchand13 September 2026
It is the right piece to have published. What I would still like to know is whether the third buyer ever told you in writing, or only in the room — because if it was in writing, the four weeks look worse.
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Camille RousselAuthor· 13 September 2026
In writing, in her report of 22 March. You are right that it looks worse, and it is the reason reports are now read across the desk rather than only by me.
Grégoire Lantier13 September 2026
My flat is one of your comparables, and I remember perfectly well that it took five months. I am glad to see the days printed beside the price now.
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Camille RousselAuthor· 13 September 2026
It was the number nobody wanted to say out loud, and you said so at the time. Your 154 days are in the panel at the top of this piece.
Hélène Faure14 September 2026
This reads well but it is still a piece in which the desk decides what its own mistake was. The honest version is shorter: you told her what she wanted to hear in March.
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Camille RousselAuthor· 14 September 2026
That is a fair reading and I am not going to argue it away. I did want the mandate, and the middle number was the comfortable one.
Julien Brun15 September 2026
I was one of the two who bought something else. The flat was never overpriced to me — it was just the third-best of three that week. Had the cut come in week three I would probably have offered on it.
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Camille RousselAuthor· 15 September 2026
Which is the whole cost of the four weeks, put more plainly than I managed in seven paragraphs. Thank you for writing it down.
Marc Delaunay16 September 2026
Publishing this is good for you. I would find it more convincing if the owner were compensated rather than quoted.
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Camille RousselAuthor· 16 September 2026
She was not compensated, and I am not going to pretend the publication is a substitute. What she asked for was that it be published with the flat named, and that is what we have done.