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Home Selling Step 6: List Your Home for Sale (Traction, Showings, Feedback, and First-Week Reality)
If you’re ready to list your home for sale, this is the step where the plan becomes public—and where the market starts answering back. Everything you did in Steps 2–5 (net proceeds, preparation, representation, and pricing discipline) is supposed to create one outcome here:
Strong traction in the first week.
That first-week signal matters because it tells you whether the market agrees with your pricing and positioning. And if the market doesn’t agree, you need to know early—before time-on-market starts eroding leverage.
Step 6 Comes After Steps 1–5 for a Reason
Listing is not the beginning of the process. It’s the moment your earlier decisions get tested in public. That’s why this series is sequenced the way it is:
- Home Selling Step 1: Deciding Whether to Sell Your Home (and Whether It Makes Sense)
- Home Selling Step 2: Understand Your Net Proceeds From Selling Your Home
- Home Selling Step 3: Prepare Your Home to Sell (Before You Hire a Realtor)
- Home Selling Step 4: Choose a Realtor to Sell Your Home (or Go FSBO, Flat-Fee, or Hybrid)
- Home Selling Step 5: Price Your Home to Sell (Texas CMA, BPO, and Appraisal Reality)
Step 6 is execution: how you launch, how you interpret early signals, and how you protect your leverage while the listing is fresh.
Launch Timing: Don’t Build Momentum Too Early
A useful analogy: a new restaurant that installs its sign months before opening often burns off early curiosity. By the time opening day arrives, the “new” feeling is gone and the first-week rush never happens.
When you list your home for sale, you want the same thing restaurants want: curiosity and demand to peak when the product is actually available.
- Online matters most. Most buyers discover homes online and then schedule showings.
- Signs still matter, but they are secondary. The sign should support the listing—not pre-announce it weeks early.
Practical rule: The “For Sale” sign should go up the day before the listing goes active at the earliest. If it goes up too soon, you often lose the best curiosity window before anyone can actually schedule a showing.
Listing Your Home at “Weird Times” Can Distort Your Feedback
If the listing goes live during a low-attention period—holiday weeks, major local event weekends, or times when families are not shopping—your first-week signal can be artificially muted.
That’s why timing and pricing have to be evaluated together. A weak first week can mean:
- the market is distracted, or
- the home is overpriced, or
- the home is misfit for its neighborhood/price band.
Traction in Week One: The Signal You Cannot Ignore
Assuming the home is move-in ready and appropriately positioned for its neighborhood, you should see meaningful activity quickly. If you are not getting showings early, there are usually only a few explanations:
- Price is too high for that neighborhood and condition.
- The listing is competing against better alternatives at the same price.
- The home is a mismatch (for example, an over-improved home in an area that will not support it).
On the flip side, a “rough” home in a strong neighborhood can still attract real buyers—if the price reflects reality.
Showings: Seller Exhaustion Is Real
When your home is listed, it will be shown. And in busy periods—especially weekends—showings can stack back-to-back. This is exhausting whether you live in the home or it is tenant-occupied.
It helps to treat the first week like a sprint:
- Have a quick “go bag” ready (water, chargers, snacks, something to do).
- Plan simple, nearby exits (a movie, the zoo, a coffee shop).
- Stay reachable so your agent can answer questions fast if needed.
You will sometimes get requests like: “We’re scheduled for later, but my buyers are discouraged—can we come now?” You can say no. But flexibility can preserve enthusiasm and keep momentum moving.
One sentence that matters: The longer a home sits, the more fatigued sellers become—and fatigued sellers make worse negotiation decisions.
Feedback: Separate Market Signal From Noise
Feedback is not always equal. Some of it is useful. Some of it is unavoidable. Your job is to sort signal from noise.
Useful feedback is market-correctable
Example: “The colors are too bold,” “The home doesn’t show as move-in ready,” or “It doesn’t feel neutral.” That is real buyer friction—and it can often be corrected.
If multiple buyers are reacting to the same thing, that is the market telling you something. The point is not to take it personally. The point is to decide whether the correction is worth the cost and effort.
Noise is feedback that ignores what the home clearly is
Example: “Too small” on a clearly marketed 900 sq. ft. home. Some comments are simply a mismatch between the buyer and the property. That does not mean you should redesign the home to satisfy them.
Open Houses: What They Are (and What They Usually Aren’t)
In most markets, including Abilene and the Big Country, open houses are rarely where the buyer who purchases the home first discovers it. Most visitors fall into two common categories:
- Neighbors and locals who are curious about the home.
- Early-stage shoppers who enjoy touring homes on weekends and are not yet fully qualified.
That doesn’t mean open houses are useless. They can build momentum, generate additional exposure, and create urgency when the listing is fresh. But it helps to understand the real structure behind them:
- Often, the agent hosting the open house is not your listing agent.
- In many offices, open houses are hosted by newer agents with fewer active clients.
- They typically know what the MLS says and what they observed in a short walkthrough.
They may still represent the home professionally. But their primary business reason for hosting is often to meet potential clients—some of whom may buy your home, and some of whom will buy another home in the neighborhood.
The First Price Reduction Conversation Should Happen Early
If you don’t have meaningful traction quickly—and you are not listed during a weird, low-attention time—your pricing conversation should happen in the first week, not weeks later.
At that point, your REALTOR® should be prepared to show you a fresh CMA that reflects what the market is doing now. Comps can change between “we talked about listing” and “we went live,” and that shift may have nothing to do with you.
The market can also change abruptly due to events that make people collectively pause. The point is simple: you cannot control that. You can only respond intelligently when the signal appears.
Concessions vs. Price Cuts
Sometimes sellers resist a price reduction and instead offer concessions. This can work—but only if concessions are common in the market at that time and only if the buyer pool is actually comparing concessions the way you think they are.
In certain slowdowns, concessions become a normal tool. In others, buyers still anchor on price first and concessions do not rescue visibility. The strategy has to match the moment.
When the Market Won’t Support What You Have to Get
This is where Step 2 (net proceeds) and Step 5 (pricing discipline) become real.
If the math looks good on paper but the first week or two shows you that the market does not support what you have to get for the home, you may have a better option than forcing the issue:
It can be smarter to pause or withdraw the listing and wait—if you can.
That is not failure. It is a strategic decision. In many cases, the best “fix” is time: more principal paid down, modest appreciation, improved cash position, or a life situation that changes. If you stay put, you can also use the time to make improvements that increase livability mid-term and reduce friction if you list again later.
Opportunity Cost: Choose the Smaller Loss
If you cannot pause because you must relocate or your timeline is fixed, you still have a decision to make. It usually looks like this:
- Take a controlled loss now and complete the move,
- carry mortgage + rent (or two mortgages) until it sells,
- or attempt a different strategy (price adjustment, concessions, or repositioning).
This is not about avoiding loss entirely. It is about choosing the smaller loss based on your cash flow, time constraints, and risk tolerance.
A High-Level Note on Relocation Assistance
If your employer is asking you to relocate and the move risks failing because the home will not sell at a workable number, it may be worth having a candid conversation early. Some companies have formal relocation benefits. Others do not—until the reality of the move threatens the business objective.
Possible support can take different forms, including:
- relocation stipends,
- temporary housing support,
- closing cost assistance,
- or limited make-whole assistance to bridge a gap.
Realistically, this conversation is best had before listing. But if the market signal makes the issue unavoidable, raising it is not a crazy ask.
Acknowledge the “Rent It” Option Without Pretending It’s Simple
Another alternative is renting the home instead of selling it. That can be a valid strategy—but it is a separate analysis with different risks, and it deserves its own discussion. For now, the key point is that “rent it” is not a frictionless escape hatch.
What Happens After You Go Under Contract
Once you accept an offer, you are not done with access. You’ll typically have multiple visits in a short window:
- inspections (often several types),
- appraisal,
- repair re-checks,
- and final walkthrough(s).
This is another reason execution matters. You are not just managing showings—you are managing a short, intense period of access and logistics while maintaining momentum toward closing.
What Comes Next After Listing Your Home for Sale
Step 6 is about launch and early signal: traction, feedback, showings, and quick course-correction when needed.
In Home Selling Step 7, we’ll go deeper on offer management: how to evaluate terms (not just price), how to handle multiple offers, how to think about concessions strategically, and how to protect your outcome once negotiation begins.
About Me — Doug Berry, MBA, REALTOR®
The Bow Tie Agent
I’m a REALTOR® with Better Homes & Gardens Senter, REALTORS® who focuses on helping clients understand the real-world side of homeownership—especially the decisions that affect long-term stability. With an MBA and experience as a lender with USDA Rural Development’s mortgage programs, I approach the process the same way I do with clients: clearly, calmly, and without sales pressure.
If you have questions, want a second set of eyes before you make a move, or want help listing and positioning a home in Abilene or the Big Country, feel free to reach out:
