Why Vancouver homes fail to sell and get relisted

When I get called into a home that has already failed, the first thing I do is try to prove it's the building. If it is, I'd rather say that in the first meeting than take the listing and waste four months of somebody's life.

So I read the depreciation report, the contingency reserve and the Form B, and I look for a levy that's approved or one I think is coming, and whether there's been envelope work and who signed off on it. In a wood frame building from the late nineties, I'm looking for poly-B and whether a rainscreen ever went on. On an older detached house, it's the wiring and a perimeter drain nobody has touched. A building with a big levy landing next spring is a hard sell, and no amount of marketing fixes that. I've turned listings down for less.

A lot of the time, though, there's nothing to find. When your home doesn't sell, your brain goes straight to what's wrong with it, and often the answer is nothing.

You open too high. The portals show your home to everybody for one week. Those people say no at that price. The portals stop showing it, because a portal's job is to show people what's new. Now you're sitting in front of an empty room. Week four, week six, week ten, there's no new audience arriving. The only thing moving is the day count going up and your leverage going down.

Then, a couple of months in, the agent comes back and says maybe we should adjust. That adjustment was coming the day you signed. When we audit our own campaigns week by week, portal traffic falls hard between the first week and the third. That's why a relist works at all: it makes you new again for about seven days. The catch is what you paid for those seven days.

• Days. Buyers' agents look at days on market and coach their clients on it. Past a couple of months, the conversation in the car changes to what's wrong with it.
• Money. Mortgage, property tax, strata fees, insurance, every month, on a home you meant to be done with. It rarely shows up on a net sheet because you just absorb it.
• Your edge. This is the expensive one. Early on you're a seller with options. Months in, you're a seller who needs to go, and the offer gets written by somebody who knows how long you've waited.

When we chain every listing at an address back to its first day on the market, the ladder runs one way. A home that sells on its first listing keeps the most of its opening price in the least time. Each extra listing costs more and takes longer. The actual rungs are in the Kyle Mark Report (free account), because the board keeps that data behind a sign-in.

The strongest pushback is that homes that relist are just worse homes. Some of that is true, and the data can't separate the two, or tell you how motivated a seller was.

The MLS® clock restarts when a home is cancelled and relisted. A home can be on the market for most of a year and show a few weeks. A cancel and relist resets the dates on the screen and that's all it resets. The agents who watched you sit all summer remember, and the listing history keeps every step. So don't read a low number on the listing as proof that your home has had a clean run, or that another one has.

Don't relist with the same photos, the same copy and a small reduction. That's the version that fails again, and I see it constantly. The audience that already saw your home isn't the audience that's going to buy it. You need a different number and a different set of eyes.

• Reset the price to what is closing right now, not what is sitting listed in your building.
• Reshoot it. The old photos are what the market already said no to.
• Rewrite the copy from scratch, and give the property its own site.
• Send it out everywhere in the same week: Instagram, YouTube, Meta, a newsletter list and a paid campaign aimed at buyers in that price band, because week one is the only week you're guaranteed.
• Keep track of every buyer who came the first time, and call them the day the price moves.

If an agent can't tell you specifically where the new eyes are coming from, they don't have an answer. They have a hope.

I'll own this too: I've listed homes that didn't sell the first time, including one where I was a little too optimistic on the first number. What got those sold was the same thing, a price that matched what was closing and a campaign aimed at a new audience.