The Hidden Cost of Overpricing Your Los Angeles Home

By Tammy Jerome

Tammy Jerome is an award-winning broker and host of “Selling Los Angeles” on the acclaimed American Dream TV show, with over two decades of experience and more than 1,500 successful transactions.

If you’re thinking about listing your home a little above market value just to see what happens, you’re not the first seller to have that thought. Leave some room to negotiate, test the waters, and see if someone bites. The logic feels sound, and most sellers I talk to in Los Angeles have considered it at some point.

Maybe your neighbor swore their cousin got way over asking. And look, I get the logic. But after helping people sell homes here for years, I can tell you that overpricing almost always costs sellers more than it saves them, and usually in ways they never saw coming.

The first 10 days are everything. When your home hits the market, it gets the most attention it will ever get. Buyers are curious, agents are engaged, and online activity peaks around new listings. That first week and a half is your home’s best shot at making a strong first impression. If the price is too high during that window, buyers don’t get excited.

They get skeptical. Instead of generating showings and offers, your home becomes background noise, and once that initial wave passes, it’s incredibly hard to get it back.

Let me break it down like we’re chatting over coffee, not sitting through a pricing lecture. Here are the three hidden costs of overpricing your home:

1. You lose the early interest you can’t get back. When a home is priced correctly from the start, it attracts strong early interest. It can generate multiple offers and create a genuine sense of urgency. When it’s overpriced, the opposite happens. Showings come in slowly. Buyers hesitate. The listing starts to go stale. And once that early window closes, recreating that energy is one of the hardest things to do in real estate.

2. Your listing helps competing homes sell faster. This one stinks a little, doesn’t it? An overpriced home can actually make other homes in the area look like a better deal. The perception of value shifts. Buyers tour your home, compare it to a more competitively priced option, and make their offer right there. Your listing essentially becomes a selling tool for the competition. Nobody wants to hear that, but it happens more often than people think.

3. Multiple price reductions weaken your position. Adjusting your price isn’t a bad thing on its own. Sometimes it’s absolutely necessary. But when a listing has multiple reductions, it tells a story in buyers’ minds. They start wondering what’s wrong with the house. They ask why it hasn’t sold. And they begin to feel like they have room to negotiate even further. At that point, you’re no longer negotiating from a position of strength. You’re playing catch-up.

Overpriced homes often sell for less in the end. A home that starts high, sits on the market, and then drops in price often ends up selling for less than it would have if it had been priced correctly from day one. The missed first-impression window, fewer serious buyers, and a weaker negotiating position all add up.

Here’s the part most sellers don’t expect: when a home is priced right, it often leads to offers above the asking price. The smart strategy isn’t to price high and hope for the best. It’s to price for attention, align with current market data, and let the timing, perception, and positioning work in your favor.

If you have questions about pricing or want to know where your home stands in today’s market, I’d love to sit down with you and walk through it. Call or text me at (818) 903-5854, or email me at tammyjerome@gmail.com. You can also visit blog.tammyjerome.com for more. I’m always happy to help.