Most listing appointments start with an argument about price. Mine doesn’t.

Here is how it usually goes. An agent arrives with a folder of comparable sales, presents a number, and the next ninety minutes become a negotiation — you defending what your home is worth, them defending a spreadsheet. Nobody enjoys it, and it happens before anyone has walked the seawall.

The first meeting

No comps, no presentation, no number. I want to see the house, and I want to hear the story — why you bought it, what you have done to it, what mattered when you chose this lot over the one three doors down. I want to understand where you are trying to get to, and whether selling now actually serves that.

Then I go away.

The second meeting

This one is the numbers. By then I have stood on your dock, seen your seawall, measured what you actually have, and priced it against properties that are genuinely comparable on the water — not merely similar in square footage.

If you wonder why I did not bring comps to the first meeting, the answer is that I could not have priced your home accurately without seeing it. An agent who arrives with a number already printed has valued a tax record, not a house.

What I bring to the second meeting

Waterfront pricing goes wrong in a specific way. Two houses on the same street can differ by more than half a million dollars in land value, and almost none of the reasons appear in a listing. Canal width is routinely overstated. Nothing records where your lot sits on the canal, or how much of that seawall a boat can actually tie to.

I have measured all of it — every parcel in Units 1–6, 98 canals, canal width and usable seawall taken in the field rather than copied from a record. Combined with 6,205 closed and failed listings going back to 2000, your price comes from evidence rather than instinct.

It also means I can explain your property’s value to a buyer in terms they understand. A wide-water cul-de-sac corner is worth what it is worth for reasons most agents cannot articulate. If your agent cannot explain it, the buyer’s agent certainly will not.

Overpricing costs more than time

There is a comfortable idea that if you ask too much you simply wait longer and get there eventually. That is true in one circumstance: when the market is rising. Then you can overprice, sit, and let the market catch up to your number.

In a flat or falling market it does not work, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Your price has to fall faster than the market does. Most sellers cut in increments — large enough to feel like a concession, never large enough to get ahead of the decline — so each new price is overpriced again by the time it goes live.

One property in my dataset first listed above $1 million in 2006 and went under contract at $1,050,000. The deal collapsed when the market did. It was relisted above a million, then cut, then cut again, always trailing the market down. It closed in April 2012 at $420,000.

That seller was not unusual. Of sellers who first listed between 2005 and 2008, failed, and came back, the median one eventually sold 31.6% below their original asking price. Fifty-six percent lost more than a quarter. Median time from first listing to closing: eight years.

Compare sellers who first listed from 2012 onward, into a rising market. Same behaviour, opposite result — the median one sold 17.3% above their original ask, and only 5% lost more than a quarter.

So the honest version is this. The market pays about 95% of a credible asking price. Ask more and what happens next depends entirely on which way the market is moving, and you do not get to know that in advance. Today supply sits at 6.4 months — neither clearly rising nor clearly falling. That is precisely when pricing right the first time matters most.

What I am not going to do

I take a small number of clients, deliberately, because the alternative is doing this badly.

I am not going to pressure you. Sometimes selling does not make sense — because of the market, or because of where you are in your life. If that is the case I will tell you, and you would rather hear it from me than discover it over fourteen months on the market.

And if we meet and you decide to list with someone else, that is a fine outcome. The first conversation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. Its only purpose is to work out whether we should work together.