Selling

Roughly half the homes that came to market over the past year never sold. The single biggest thing separating the ones that did was not staging, photography or timing. It was the number on the listing in week one.

Leilani Fong PREC* | Port Moody, Coquitlam & Port Coquitlam | August 2026

About half of listings actually sell

That number surprises most sellers, and it is not a sign of a collapsing market. Sales volumes held roughly steady over the same stretch. It is a sign of a market where buyers have enough choice to simply pass, and a home that is not priced correctly gets passed.

The most expensive mistake is the first asking price

We split every local sale from the past year into two groups: homes that sold without ever reducing their price, and homes that needed at least one cut.

Average days on market. 2,955 transactions with complete pricing history, August 2025 through June 2026. Source: MLS records.

Homes priced correctly from day one sold in about three and a half weeks, for 97.5 percent of what they first asked. Homes that had to be reduced took ten weeks, and still ended up at 91.4 percent of their original number.

On a $1.2 million home, that six point gap is roughly $73,000, plus six extra weeks of carrying costs, showings and uncertainty. No amount of staging recovers a pricing mistake made in week one.

Detached sellers pay the steepest penalty

Final sold price as a percentage of the original asking price. Based on 1,045 and 306 condo sales, 516 and 145 townhouse sales, and 641 and 211 detached sales in the never-reduced and reduced groups respectively. Source: MLS records.

Every category carries a penalty, but detached houses carry the worst of it. A detached home that needs a reduction ends up at 89.7 percent of its original ask, more than seven points below one that was priced right, and takes 73 days instead of 25.

That makes sense. Detached homes are the least comparable to each other, so sellers have the most room to talk themselves into an optimistic number, and buyers have the most difficulty justifying one.

Why the first two weeks decide it

A listing gets its largest audience in its first fortnight. Every buyer actively searching your area sees it immediately, compares it against everything else available, and forms a judgement within minutes.

Price above that judgement and your home quietly becomes the one that makes the others look reasonable. It does the work of selling your neighbour's listing. By the time the price comes down, the active buyers have already chosen something else, and what remains is a listing carrying a visible history of reductions, which invites the next buyer to wait for another one.

Cutting the price later does not rescue it

The tempting response is to list high and reduce if it does not work. The data says that plan fails more often than it succeeds. Of the listings that came off the market without selling, 27.5 percent had already cut their price, by an average of 4.4 percent. They reduced, and it still was not enough.

A reduction only works if it lands below where the market had already decided you were. By the time a seller is willing to make that cut, the market has usually moved further than they have.

Where the work actually happens

It happens before the listing goes live. What has actually sold near you, what is competing with you right now, and what a buyer comparing four similar homes will conclude in the thirty seconds they spend on yours.

Data source: MLS sales records for Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam, August 2025 through June 2026. These figures describe our local market and are not Metro Vancouver wide; no real estate board publishes comparable sell-through or price-reduction statistics for the region. July 2026 sales are excluded because reporting was still incomplete at the time of writing. Median and average figures are calculated from MLS records. This article is general market information and not advice on any specific property. Leilani Fong PREC* is a licensed REALTOR with eXp Realty Canada.