Almost no sellers do this, and the ones who do arrive at every subsequent conversation better informed than I could make them with a spreadsheet.
Before you list, go and see four or five homes that a buyer would consider instead of yours. Open houses are enough. It takes one Saturday afternoon.
What it does
It makes the price real. Reading that comparable homes sold at a number is abstract. Standing in one and thinking "ours is better than this" or, more usefully, "ours is not" settles the question in a way no report does.
It shows you what staging does. See a staged home and an empty one on the same afternoon and the argument is over. Nobody who has done this needs persuading about the budget afterwards.
It tells you what you notice. You will walk in and react to a dated bathroom, a dark hallway, a smell, a cluttered worktop. Those reactions are exactly what buyers will have in your home, and you will spot them in your own house on the drive back.
It gives us shared reference points. This is the part sellers do not anticipate. Weeks later, when we are discussing whether to reduce or how to respond to an offer, being able to say "remember the house on Elm, the one with the good kitchen and the small third bedroom" is worth more than an hour of abstraction. We are then talking about real houses rather than adjectives.
How to do it usefully
- Go to homes a buyer would genuinely weigh against yours, not the ones you admire.
- Include one clearly above your range and one below. The boundaries teach you more than the middle.
- Note the asking price before you walk in, and your own estimate before you look it up.
- Take photographs of anything that works, and anything that does not.
- Then follow what each one sells for. That is where the real education is.
Some sellers come back having realised their home needs more work, or is worth less than they hoped. That is not a failure of the exercise. It is the entire point, arriving in week zero when you can still act on it rather than in week eight when you cannot.
Happy to walk through them with you and point out what a buyer's agent would say about each one. It is a better use of an afternoon than most listing presentations.