What we got wrong
We priced a flat in Saint-Dominique too high in March. Here is what it cost.
Seven weeks, eleven hours kept, no offer — and a cut of €140 000 we should have taken in the third week. The owner has read this piece and asked us to publish it with her flat named.
Advisor · Desk 07 · since 2019 · answers in 1 h 10
The number we chose, and how.
We put 31 rue Saint-Dominique on the floor at €1 950 000 — the middle of three numbers the owner had been given, and the one I argued for. I arrived at it on three comparable sales in the same three streets, an adjustment for the courtyard aspect and a small addition for the kitchen. What I did not weigh was that two of those three had taken five months to sell. I used the prices they achieved and ignored the time it took.
Three buyers said the same sentence.
Eleven buyers saved the home in the first fortnight and four asked for an hour. I kept all four and wrote them up the same evening. Three said a version of one thing: the flat was worth what we were asking, but no better than the two others they were seeing that week. 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.
“Fairly priced, but so are the two we saw on Thursday.” — hour 2, 22 March
What I wrote instead of cutting.
By week five the saves had stopped and no new hour had been asked for since the ninth. I wrote to the owner on 18 April to say April is quiet in the 7th. True, and 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. The cut came on 4 May — four weeks after the third buyer had effectively asked for it, and by then two of the four had bought elsewhere.
By the fifth week we were the only people in the building who still believed the price.
The two dull things we changed.
Every comparable now carries its days-on-floor beside its price, and that figure appears on the sheet the owner signs — so the number that was missing from my working is now the hardest one to miss. And when three reports carry the same sentence, the desk head sees it without me raising it: reports are read across the desk, not only down it.
“You told me the truth in June. I would have liked it in April.”
