When agents sit down to price a listing, we know the drill: Pull the solds. Look at what’s coming soon, active and pending. Adjust for condition, location, square footage and amenities. Figure out where our house fits.
But there’s another category of data sitting right there in the MLS that we frequently overlook: the houses nobody bought.
Expired. Canceled. Withdrawn. Earlier in my career, I looked at these failed listings all the time. Then the market changed. When inventory became tight, and buyers were competing for homes, digging through failed listings often wasn’t necessary to determine where a property would sell.
Now the market is shifting again; pricing must be more precise, and I’m sharpening my approach by bringing an old tool back into my pricing process.
A sold comp tells us where a buyer said yes, but a failed listing can help us figure out where buyers said no. And in a buyer-favored market, that’s valuable information.
Someone else already tested the price for you
Imagine you’re pricing a home, and the recent comparable sales range from $600,000 to $625,000. Then you expand your search.
- A similar home listed at $675,000, sat for 60 days, dropped to $659,000, then $649,000 and eventually expired.
- Another started at $665,000, canceled after three months, relisted at $629,000 and sold for $615,000.
- Another tried $650,000 for 100 days before withdrawing.
Suddenly, you know considerably more than the sold comps alone told you. Other sellers have already tested the upper limits of pricing, and buyers responded. It’s essentially a series of pricing experiments someone else conducted for you — and they paid the carrying costs.
Don’t just look at where it ended. Look at the journey
One of the most interesting things buried in MLS history is the pricing journey. A property might show a final list price of $649,000 and an eventual sale of $630,000. Dig deeper, and you may discover this:
$725,000 → $699,000 → $675,000 → canceled → relisted at $649,000 → sold for $630,000.
That’s a different story. The sale tells us what one buyer eventually paid. The listing history tells us buyers had previously rejected that house at $725,000, $699,000 and $675,000.
It also illustrates something sellers don’t always understand: Getting to the right price eventually isn’t necessarily the same as pricing correctly from the beginning. After months of market exposure and multiple reductions, buyers may stop asking, “Could this be the house?” They start asking, “What’s wrong with it?”
Find out what buyers bought instead
When I find a comparable property that sat for 90 days without selling, I want to know what did sell during those same 90 days. Sometimes we blame the market when the market was functioning just fine. Buyers were buying houses. They simply weren’t buying that one.
Maybe they chose the renovated house at $640,000. Maybe they paid $650,000 for the better lot. They may have even paid more for another property because it offered something the failed listing didn’t. That’s useful information when you’re sitting across from a seller who believes buyers just need more time to appreciate their home.
If buyers repeatedly toured the property and purchased competing homes instead, the market may already have delivered its opinion.
Failure doesn’t always mean price
This is where agents have to resist oversimplifying the data. An expired listing isn’t automatic proof that a house was overpriced, and a canceled listing certainly isn’t either.
Listings fail for all sorts of reasons. Sellers change their minds. Job transfers fall through. Repairs surface. Agents get fired. Sometimes a seller receives a perfectly acceptable offer and decides not to move.
So, investigate. Call the previous agent. I might simply say:
“I’m pricing a similar property and noticed yours was on the market last year. Is there anything you can tell me about the activity or why the seller decided not to continue?”
Twenty-seven showings and no offers tell me something. Two showings in four months tells me something different.
Calculate the cost of being wrong
There’s one more number worth considering: the cost of the pricing journey.
Find a house that started high, sat, reduced, expired, relisted and eventually sold. Then compare it with similar homes that entered the market closer to where buyers were actually buying.
- Did the overpriced house ultimately sell for less?
- How many additional mortgage payments did the seller make?
- What did they spend on taxes, insurance, utilities, lawn care and maintenance while waiting?
Sellers often view aspirational pricing as a no-risk strategy: “We can always come down.” Technically, that’s true. But time isn’t free, and neither is market perception.
3 things to add to your next pricing analysis
The next time you’re preparing a CMA in a shifting or buyer-favored market:
- Pull the failures: Search expired, canceled and withdrawn listings alongside sold, active and pending properties.
- Reconstruct the journey: Look at original price, reductions, days on market, relisting history and, whenever possible, the eventual outcome.
- Find what beat them: Look at what buyers actually purchased while those properties were sitting on the market.
We’re very good at studying success in real estate. But as pricing gets harder, I’ve found myself returning to an old habit: studying the failures, too. Sold listings tell us where buyers have been willing to say yes. Sometimes the house nobody bought is the one that tells us exactly where they started saying no.
