How to Ask for a Price Reduction Without Asking

By Katie Taylor & James Goodman

With a combined 30 years of experience in the real estate industry, Katie and James lead the Goodman Taylor Team, one of the top-performing teams in the Greater Phoenix area.

If you’re asking for a price reduction, you already lost the argument.

Not because the price is wrong. Because you’re asking. The agents who don’t make that call aren’t better at it. They set it up so it never comes.

The call has a shape and every agent knows it. You took the listing at a number you weren’t thrilled about, because the seller had one in their head and you wanted the listing. Three weeks, nothing. Six weeks, and you’re in a parked car running the conversation twice before you dial.

Then you make it and you’re the bad guy. The one who was wrong, or the one who’s giving up. They push back, you split the difference, you land on a cut too small to move anything, and in a month you get to do it again.

That’s not a negotiation problem. That’s a calendar problem. You’re having a conversation in week six that belonged in week zero.

And the clock is expensive. Redfin found 34.2% of February sellers cut their price, the highest February share in records going back to 2012. The ones who cut averaged $40,915. That’s not the cost of pricing wrong. That’s the cost of pricing wrong and then waiting.

The reduction is a base case now, not a maybe. Start here, because it changes how you frame everything else.

A third of sellers are cutting nationally. In the softest markets, more than half are. And more than half of February’s listings were stale, sitting 60 days without going under contract, the highest share since 2019. The typical home that did go under contract took 66 days, the slowest pace in a decade.

Read that with your listing appointment in mind. You’re not warning a seller about something that might happen. You’re describing the most common outcome in the market they’re about to enter.

Which makes it an easier thing to say, not a harder one. You’re not predicting their failure. You’re describing the weather. Most homes in this market get repriced. The ones that don’t are the ones that started right. Here’s what we do if we end up in the group that has to adjust.

Nobody argues with that sentence at week zero. Everybody argues with it at week six. Same sentence.

Set the date and the number before you list. This is the whole thing. Everything else is detail.

Before you sign, you agree on two things. A date, and a number. If there’s no offer by day 21, the price goes here. Not “we’ll revisit.” Not “we’ll see where we are.” Those aren’t agreements, they’re the same conversation postponed with extra steps. A date on the calendar and a figure in dollars, decided while everyone is calm and nobody’s been told no by anyone yet.

Then the day arrives and there’s no ask in it. You’re not persuading, you’re not delivering news, you’re executing something you both decided when you were both thinking clearly. 90 seconds. An update, not a negotiation.

Two things to get right. The date goes inside your market’s median days on market, not past it, because you want to move while there’s still buyer attention on the listing rather than after it’s gone. And the number has to actually do something. A cut too small to reach a different search bracket isn’t a price reduction. It’s an announcement that you’re getting nervous.

If a seller won’t agree to a trigger at all, that’s not necessarily a no. But you’ve just learned what week six is going to feel like, and you learned it for free.

When the day comes, show, don’t argue. The trigger doesn’t do all the work. You still have to sit down.

So bring the market, not your opinion. “I think we’re too high” is an adjective, and nobody’s ever been talked out of their price by an adjective. Bring what happened. How many people walked through. What sold nearby and at what. Where the buyers who didn’t come to you went instead.

Then stop talking. Sellers don’t want to be convinced. They want to arrive at it, because a conclusion you reach yourself is one you can defend. Lay the evidence out in an order that leads somewhere and get out of the way. When they say the number before you do, you ran it right.

And be honest about what waiting costs, because it’s the one thing they can’t see from where they’re sitting. Redfin’s economists found that homes with a price cut sell for less because of the stigma the cut creates. The reduction doesn’t just cost you the reduction. It marks the listing. So the choice was never cutting versus not cutting. It’s cutting now, or cutting more later from a weaker position.

So stop practicing the call. Build a listing appointment where you never have to make it.

The trigger conversation isn’t hard. It’s just early, and early is the only thing that makes it easy. Every difficult version of this conversation is difficult because someone waited.

This is the kind of thing we work through with the agents around us, because most of what looks like a negotiating problem in this business is a calendar problem wearing a costume.

If you’re rethinking how you handle this, reach out. Call or text us at (480) 612-5866, or email us at james@theeverydayagent.com. More of how we think about it is at theeverydayagent.com. Always happy to talk shop with another agent.