The One Thing Your Agent Tells You to Do That Won’t Help Your Sale

There is one piece of advice almost every seller hears before they list. Price high. You can always come down.

The advice sounds sensible. Leave room to negotiate, test the ceiling, and see what the market gives you. And for the last two years, in a market starved of stock, sellers who priced high often got away with it. A buyer with nothing else to look at eventually met the number.

That market has changed. Pricing high and adjusting later is now one of the most expensive mistakes a Perth seller can make, and the reason is simple: the conditions that used to rescue an overpriced home have disappeared.

Why the advice used to work, and why it doesn’t now

Through 2024 and most of 2025, Perth had too few homes and too many buyers. An ambitious price could sit for a few weeks and still find someone, because there was nothing else on the market to compete with it.

The numbers tell you how much has changed. REIWA reported that listings for sale in Perth passed 7,000 in early September 2026, the first time in more than three years. Houses now take around three weeks to sell, up from just over a week during the frenzy of late 2025. Buyers have a choice again, and they are using it.

Here is the stat that should end the “price high” argument on its own. In June 2026, 70% of Perth houses are still sold at or above their listing price. Price a home right and the market still meets it or beats it. The catch is in the other 30%, the share selling below list, which has tripled from roughly one in ten earlier in the year. That group is not being punished by the market. It is being punished by its opening number.

The same shift shows up in how far sellers are having to move. REIWA found the average gap between listing and sale price collapsed from plus 6.5 per cent in the March quarter to plus 1.0 per cent in June. Sellers used to bank on a buyer paying over the asking price. Now the asking price is the ceiling, not the floor, and setting it too high just means the whole campaign starts from the wrong place.

What actually happens when you price too high

An overpriced home does its worst damage in the first two weeks, the window when a fresh listing pulls the most attention. Launch above where buyers see value and that window burns on clicks that never turn into inspections. By the time the price is corrected, the launch is spent, the listing looks stale, and buyers who watched it drop now read it as a motivated seller and offer lower still.

Nothing went wrong with the market. The number was wrong from the start.

The part that matters for the inner south

This matters most at the top of the market, the premium inner-south homes we know best. Prices here are still holding and in many pockets still rising, but the buyer pool is small and selective, and it gets more selective the higher the price climbs.

For a home in Applecross or Mount Pleasant, that pool might be a few dozen genuine buyers, not a few hundred. Price it to chase a headline figure from last year and you are not testing the ceiling. You are quietly marketing to people who have already moved on. At this end, an accurate price is not a soft opening bid. It is the whole campaign.

The honest catch, because there always is one

Here is the part worth holding onto. Perth is still a growth market. REIWA’s annual median rose again in August to $960,000, up more than 18%  on a year ago, and suburbs right across the metro area posted fresh gains over the month. Over any real timeframe, this market still rewards sellers.

What has changed is the pace, not the direction. After the frenzy of late 2025, buyers now have more homes to choose from, so the days of naming a number and watching three buyers fight over it have eased. That does not change your price. It changes how little room you have to get it wrong. In a rising market, a sharp price still wins. An inflated one just sails past the buyers who were ready to pay.

And no, sharp does not mean cheap. The goal was never a quick sale at any number. It is real competition from day one, enough of it to push the price to the top of what the market will actually pay. You only get that when the opening number has evidence behind it.

What to do instead

Ask any agent who quotes you a number one question: show me the working. Which recent, comparable sales support this figure? How do land, condition and location differ from those sales, and how has that been accounted for? Which buyers are expected to pay it, and how many of them are there right now?

A confident price with a clear explanation behind it is worth far more than a big number with nothing under it. If an agent leads with the largest figure and can’t show you the evidence, be careful. That number may be there to win your listing, not to sell your home.

If you want a straight read on where your place actually sits, with the comparable sales and current buyer demand laid out so you can see how the figure was reached, that is the kind of appraisal worth getting. No inflated number to win your business, just an honest starting point you can make real decisions on.

Thinking of selling? Get an honest appraisal from us, and we’ll give it to you straight.