Reduce meaningfully and early, or not at all. And be careful with relisting — it does not hide what you think it hides.
Sooner than feels comfortable. The first two to three weeks carry your best exposure, because every buyer already searching sees the home then. Spending that window on a price nobody will pay is the most expensive part of a slow listing.
If two or three weeks pass with no showings, or several weeks of showings produce no offers, the market has told you something. Waiting another month usually adds days on market without adding buyers.
A reduction has to move the home into a different search bracket to do anything. Buyers search in round numbers. Dropping from $625,000 to $619,000 is invisible: the same people see it and pass again. Dropping to $599,000 puts it in front of everyone searching under $600,000, which is a different audience entirely.
A series of small reductions is the worst pattern. It signals a seller following the market down rather than meeting it, it accumulates days on market, and it teaches buyers to wait for the next one.
One decisive reduction that lands in a new bracket will almost always outperform three timid ones that keep you in the same bracket for another two months.
Less than sellers fear. Price reductions are ordinary and buyers see them constantly. What does read as a problem is the pattern: a long listing history with repeated small drops suggests either an unrealistic seller or an issue that keeps surfacing in inspections.
Cancelling a listing and relisting fresh resets the publicly visible days-on-market count. It does not erase the history. Any REALTOR® can see the previous listings, their prices and their dates, and a buyer's agent doing their job will tell their client.
So a relist can be legitimately useful — a genuine repositioning after real changes such as new photos, staging, completed repairs or a substantially different price. As a cosmetic reset it fools no one who matters, since the person advising your buyer sees straight through it.
It does, but indirectly. Long exposure invites the assumption that something is wrong, and it strengthens a buyer's negotiating position because they infer you have run out of alternatives. It does not change what your home is worth — it changes what buyers believe they can offer.
Which is the real argument for pricing correctly at launch rather than testing a number: the days accumulate whether or not the price was ever realistic.