Did You Miss Your Best Time to Sell? You're Watching the Wrong Clock

August 11, 2026

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A homeowner said something to me recently that I've been hearing in different versions all year.


It usually comes out somewhere between the small talk and the real conversation.


"I probably should have sold two years ago."


I've learned to listen for what's underneath that sentence, because it usually isn't just about home values. It's a bigger question people are almost afraid to say out loud: Did I wait too long to make the move I've been thinking about?


Maybe the house is becoming more work than it used to be. Maybe there are rooms you walk past more than you walk into. Maybe family is farther away than you'd like, or retirement stopped being a someday and started being a date. Or maybe you've simply reached the point where you're wondering whether this house still makes sense for the life you're actually living now.


If you've owned your home for fifteen or twenty years and you've done that math in your head, this article is for you.


There are two clocks running, and most people only read one


When homeowners ask me about timing, they're almost always reading what I call the market clock. Prices, interest rates, inventory, days on market. That clock matters, and I watch it every week. It tells us what buyers are doing, what homes like yours are selling for, and how much competition you'd face if you listed tomorrow.


But there's another clock running in your life that doesn't care what the Federal Reserve does. I call it the life clock. It keeps track of the upkeep on rooms nobody uses, the repairs you keep pushing to next year, the distance between you and the people you want more time with, and what your equity could make possible if your housing situation looked different.


Here's what makes right now interesting. In the Sacramento region, the market clock hasn't been moving dramatically year over year. Well-prepared homes are still selling. But for many of the longtime homeowners I sit with, the life clock is the one that's been getting louder, and it's been getting louder the whole time they were watching the other one.


Which brings me to the sentence I most want you to take away from this article. You can wait for a better market and still end up with worse timing.


Think about what that actually means. You could hold out for a stronger spring, get an extra percent or two on the sale price, and still lose the trade, because during those months the roof aged, the stairs got harder, and another season with the grandkids went by at a distance. The market gave you a little more money. The waiting took something that money can't buy back.


That doesn't mean you should sell now. It means waiting has a cost too, and that cost deserves a seat at the table when you decide. So instead of asking "did I miss my window," here are three things I'd do first. I promise none of them involve decluttering or boosting your curb appeal.


1. Calculate the cost of one more year


Don't start with what your house is worth. Start with what staying costs you.


Sit down and put real numbers on a single year of staying put. Property taxes and insurance. Utilities on square footage you don't really use. Routine maintenance, and then the deferred items you already know are coming, because a roof, an HVAC system, or an exterior repair rarely gets cheaper by waiting. If you're not sure what those items would run, that's worth finding out now rather than discovering it in a buyer's inspection report two years from now, when it becomes a negotiation instead of a plan.


Then be honest about the practical side, because not everything that costs you shows up on a spreadsheet. How much of your week goes to maintaining space you don't really use? Is the yard still something you enjoy, or something you manage? When was the last time the guest rooms held guests? Is the house making your life easier, or have you started planning your life around the house?


That last question deserves a slow answer. I've noticed that people rarely realize how much they've adapted to a house until they say it out loud. They've stopped using the upstairs. They schedule around the yard work. They've quietly moved their whole life to one floor. None of those choices felt like a decision at the time, but together they're telling you something.


You don't have to do anything with the answer. But it's hard to make a good timing decision without knowing it, because most homeowners are unconsciously comparing today's sale price against what they might have gotten in 2022. I think there's a far more useful comparison: what would moving today make possible, versus what would another year of staying require? That's a very different calculation, and it's one almost nobody runs.


2. Study what didn't sell


Every seller hears about comparable sales. Your agent shows you what sold nearby, and you use those numbers to set expectations. That's necessary, but it's only half the evidence.


I also want to see the homes that came on the market and didn't sell. In any neighborhood, there are listings that were withdrawn, canceled, or expired without finding a buyer, and those homes are evidence too. Sometimes the price was based on memory rather than the current market. Sometimes the condition didn't support the asking price. Sometimes buyers simply had better choices that month, and sometimes the seller's plans changed, and it had nothing to do with the house at all.


The point isn't to guess what went wrong, and it's certainly not to judge those sellers. It's to investigate, because those homes can show you exactly where seller expectations and buyer behavior separate. When you look at that list, patterns start to appear. You see which price points buyers pushed back on. You see how long homes sat before their price reductions, and whether the reductions came fast enough to matter. You see what condition buyers were willing to pay for and what they walked past.


So before you choose your own strategy, ask your agent to pull the homes near you that came off the market without selling over the last six months, and talk through what the available evidence suggests about each one. If an agent can't have that conversation with you using real data, keep interviewing agents.


I spent twenty years managing large, complex statewide technology projects for the State of California before real estate, and that work taught me something I've carried into this business ever since: you can learn as much from where a plan failed as from where it succeeded. When a project went sideways, we didn't shrug and move on. We studied it, found where the plan and reality separated, and built a better plan. Selling a home deserves the same discipline.


3. Know what the move needs to produce


Here's a distinction I wish more homeowners understood. Your next-move number and your listing price are two different numbers, sourced from different places.


Your next-move number is the financial goal the move must achieve. Work through it piece by piece. What might remain after your mortgage payoff and the costs of selling? What will housing cost on the other side, whether that's a smaller home, a single story, a different community, or a place closer to family? What will the move itself cost, including the parts people forget, like storage, overlap between homes, and getting a new place set up? And what cushion do you want left over when everything is done, so the next chapter starts with breathing room instead of a tight budget?


Your listing price is different. That number has to come from the market: comparable sales, condition, competition, and what buyers are actually doing right now. It's evidence-based, or it's fiction.


Work out what the move needs to accomplish first. Then compare it with what today's market can reasonably support. Sometimes those numbers line up beautifully, and the decision gets simple fast. Sometimes there's a gap, and finding that out before the FOR SALE sign goes in the yard is a gift, because a gap isn't a dead end. It's information. Maybe the timing shifts a season. Maybe some targeted preparation changes what the market will support. Maybe the destination changes. And maybe the answer is that the move doesn't pencil yet, and staying put, on purpose this time, is the right call.


Some of the most important conversations I have with homeowners end exactly there, with us deciding the numbers don't work yet and mapping out what would need to change. Nobody lists a house that day. But everybody leaves knowing where they actually stand, and that's worth more than a guess dressed up as a plan.


So, did you miss your window?


Maybe you missed a market peak. That's not the same thing as missing your opportunity to make a good move.


Maybe selling this fall makes sense. Maybe next spring is better, after you've handled a few repairs on your terms instead of a buyer's. And maybe, once you see the numbers, staying exactly where you are is still the right decision. That's a real outcome too, and I've told plenty of people exactly that at their own kitchen tables.


What I wouldn't do is let the memory of what your house might have sold for in 2022 make today's decision for you. The question isn't whether you missed the market. It's whether the home you're in still fits the life you're building. That's worth answering with real numbers, at your kitchen table, on your timeline.


If you'd like help running yours, that's exactly the kind of conversation I'm built for.


Suzette Loggins is a REALTOR® Associate DRE 00993687 with Guide Real Estate and founder of THE REAL 916, serving the Sacramento region.


Most Agents List Homes. I Navigate Lives.™


Market data source: Redfin, based on calculations of home data from MLS and/or public records, mid-year 2026. Figures vary by geography and reporting period, and different data providers can show different numbers for the same market. If you'd like to see what the data says about your specific neighborhood, reach out, and I'll pull it for you.

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July 14, 2026
At least three times this year, I have sat down with a homeowner who was not asking me what their home was worth. They had already decided. They had done the research, read the articles, pulled the online estimates, and this is the new part: they had asked an AI model. By the time we met, the number was set. They weren't looking for a valuation. They were looking for me to explain why the technology was wrong. I want to be careful about how I describe those meetings, because I don't think those sellers did anything foolish. They were doing what smart, informed people do: gathering information before a major decision. I use AI almost every day myself. It helps me research faster, challenge my own assumptions, and sometimes catch patterns I would have missed. But something happens in that moment that I don't think anyone is talking about yet. AI isn't changing how people price homes. It's changing when they get attached to a price. A seller asks an AI model what their home is worth. 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Why the number matters so much in the first place I want to be fair to sellers here, because I don't think this attachment is a character flaw. I think it's the most understandable thing in the world. A home is not a stock position. It's where someone raised their kids. Where they cared for an aging parent in the back bedroom. Where twenty-two Thanksgivings happened. And for a lot of the people I work with, homeowners in their fifties, sixties, seventies, thinking seriously about what comes next, that number isn't a number at all. It's the plan. It's whether they can be close to the grandchildren. It's whether the next place has a step-free entry. It's whether there's enough left over to take care of someone they love. So when a homeowner is asked to put a price on that house, they are not really being asked to price a property. They are asked to assign a value to a chapter of their life, then hear strangers negotiate against it. That's why pricing conversations are never just about math. And it's why the source of that first number, the one that lodges in someone's mind before anyone else has weighed in, matters far more than we've been willing to admit. First, the part most agents won't say out loud Earlier this year, Fortune reported on a Florida homeowner who used ChatGPT to help price, prepare, market, and negotiate the sale of his home. He listed roughly $100,000 above the agents' recommendation. He sold in five days. That story should make every real estate professional a little uncomfortable, and not because "AI won." Read the detail that actually matters: he said the agents lacked confidence defending their own number. That's not an AI story. That's an agent story. 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In June, broker Ryan Serhant described a $50 million penthouse deal that nearly collapsed. The buyer asked ChatGPT whether he was overpaying. It said yes. The seller asked the same tool whether he should hold out for more. It said yes to that, too. Same tool. Same property. Same week. Two opposite answers, each one confidently supported. These models are built to be helpful, and helpfulness feels an awful lot like agreement. They are extraordinarily good at constructing a case from the information you hand them. Which means: AI doesn't just answer your question. It amplifies the assumption buried inside it. Ask "Is my home worth $900,000?" and you will get a far more articulate version of the answer you were already hoping for. Ask "what would make my home worth $900,000, and what would make that number unrealistic?" and you will get something genuinely useful. Same tool. Entirely different conversation. This is not an argument against using AI. It's an argument for asking AI better questions, which, honestly, is the same skill I'd want from any client sitting across from any advisor. The market charges you for the attachment None of this would matter much if being wrong were cheap. It isn't anymore. Realtor.com's June 2026 data found that homes going under contract around the four-week mark closed meaningfully above the monthly average relative to asking price, while homes still sitting at eighteen weeks closed below it. Their senior economist put it about as bluntly as an economist can: the pandemic gave sellers a free pass on pricing, and that pass has expired. An overpriced home today doesn't just sit. It goes stale, it loses leverage, and it very often sells for less than it would have if it had been priced correctly on day one. So the cost of defending the wrong number isn't abstract. It's weeks. And then it's dollars. 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They don't walk out saying the northeast exposure improves perceived square footage. They walk out saying they could see themselves there. That's the whole ballgame, and it happens in about eight seconds. There is no spreadsheet that fully captures that, and there is no model that can reliably predict how a particular buyer will react in the eight seconds after they walk through a front door. That reaction is where offers come from. Not from data. From people. And pricing is only the first decision Here's what I think gets lost in the whole "can AI price a home" debate: Pricing is one decision. It's the loudest one, so it gets the attention, but it is genuinely just the first in a long line. When do you list, and does waiting six weeks help you or cost you? What do you fix, and what do you deliberately leave alone? Do you take the cleaner offer or the higher one? Do you buy first or sell first? Do you counter or hold? Do you accept the repair request, or would you offer a credit? And underneath all of it, the question almost nobody asks out loud: should you move at all right now? Those are the decisions that determine how a sale actually turns out, and they are the ones I've built my business around. Not listing homes. Helping people navigate one of the largest financial and emotional decisions of their lives, usually at a moment when something else in their life is already changing. What I answer before I ever recommend a price Before I give a client a number, I have to answer questions no model can answer for me: What actually happens to people when they walk through this front door? What are buyers saying about this home after they leave, not on the feedback form, in the driveway? Is there something in this floor plan that makes people hesitate before they say why? What do buyers say about this street that never shows up online? Who is moving into this neighborhood right now: downsizers, first-time buyers, growing families? At this price, are buyers falling in love with homes, or negotiating every single dollar? Those answers don't come from an algorithm. They come from being in this market in person this week and from listening closely to what people say when they think the conversation is over. So, can ChatGPT price your home? It can give you a starting point. A well-organized, well-reasoned, genuinely useful starting point. I'd rather you walk in with one than without one. Just don't mistake it for the finish line. AI has changed how we gather information, and I think that's a good thing. Better information leads to better questions, and better questions lead to better conversations. But the biggest decisions in our lives have never been made with information alone. They're made by people, usually at a kitchen table, while something else is going on in the background that no model knows about. So I don't compete with AI. I use it. My clients use it. And then, together, we test it against what it can't fully see: today's market, human behavior, and the person who will eventually walk through your front door and decide, in about eight seconds, whether this feels like home. AI can give you a number. It cannot give you a buyer. So here's my invitation. Have you already asked AI what your home is worth? Bring me the answer. I won't tell you it's wrong. I'll help you find out whether the market agrees. Suzette Loggins is a REALTOR® Associate with Guide Real Estate and the founder of THE REAL 916, serving Sacramento and the surrounding region. Most agents list homes. She navigates lives.