How Do You Set a Price Record?

By Ed Kaminsky | Rocket Bay | Week 9

Every seller I’ve worked with wants the best possible price. A few want more than that. They want a record.

It’s a fair goal. In the South Bay, plenty of homes have sold for numbers nobody would have predicted a few years earlier. But there are very different ways to chase a record price. Some give a seller a real shot at one. Others can cause a serious financial hiccup along the way.

I want to walk through both, starting with the risk.

What’s the Risk of Pricing Your Home Above the Comps?

The most common way a seller thinks about pricing goes something like this: “My home is better than the others. I’m going to price it higher, and I’m going to get a higher price.”

You see it in every market, luxury and non-luxury alike. The seller arrives at a number, asks the agent to get it, and the home goes on the market above what the comparable sales appear to support.

I understand the logic. If you never ask, you’ll never know. And when a home is genuinely one of a kind, there may be no true comparable sales to rely on. One way to discover the top of the market is to put a high number out there and see if someone pays it.

The problem is what happens when nobody does.

In my experience, when a home comes out priced above what most agents and buyers perceive it’s worth, it tends to sit. Buyers don’t make offers on a home they think is overpriced, partly because they don’t want to start a negotiation from a number they consider unrealistic. Showings slow down. The listing gets older. And eventually the seller has to reduce the price to bring the activity back.

Here’s the painful part. Sometimes that reduction has to go well below where the home probably could have been priced in the first place, had the pricing been thought through more strategically. By then, buyers are asking a different question. It’s no longer “What’s this home worth?” It’s “Why hasn’t it sold?”

That doesn’t mean pricing high never works. It means it’s a strategy with real costs, and a seller should choose it with eyes open.

What Counts as a Record Price?

Before going further, it helps to be clear about what a “record” means, because people use the word loosely.

A record might be the highest price ever paid in a state, a city, a neighborhood or on a single street. It might be the highest price per square foot, or the highest price for a particular kind of property, like a lot, a beachfront home or a new build. Each one is measured differently, and each one depends on which sales are counted and over what period.

There’s also a difference between an asking price and a sale price. An asking price is a hope. A record is what a buyer actually pays, after the sale closes and records. And a buyer paying more than the asking price isn’t necessarily the same thing as a buyer paying more than the market. Sometimes a closed sale above the asking price simply shows that the market valued the home more highly than the list price suggested.

When Does Pricing High Make Sense? A Lake Coeur d’Alene Example

I’ll start outside the South Bay, because the best example I have of a high-price strategy working isn’t local.

A few years back, I was brought in to help sell Sky Pine Estate, a lakefront property on Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. It was a truly substantial property. The main home was about 16,620 square feet, and the estate included a 2,400-square-foot boathouse, a private helipad and two airplane hangars at the Coeur d’Alene Airport. There weren’t any relevant comparable sales that were easy to identify.

The owner decided to bring in a California marketing strategist, which was me, to work alongside a local broker. Together, we set the asking price at $30 million, well above any sale I knew of in the area.

The short version is that we got it sold. It closed at $27.5 million in December 2020, and at the time it was reported as the most expensive home ever sold in Idaho.

Why did it work? I think there was enough rationale behind the price, enough value in everything the property offered, for a buyer to make the decision. The buyer also came equipped with a full financial team that was very proactive in evaluating the property’s value and its long-term worth as an asset. That’s not a typical buyer, and it’s not a typical property.

That’s the point. It was a case where setting the bar high and seeing how the market reacted made sense. In my experience, those cases are the exception. I’ve seen the same strategy fail more often than I’ve seen it win.

What Happened at 108 The Strand in Manhattan Beach?

Now the opposite end of the story, right here in Manhattan Beach.

108 The Strand is a modern beachfront home of about 6,910 square feet, built in 2014, on the south end of the Strand. It came on the market in January 2025 at $27,995,000.

The price was later reduced to $22,995,000. The home then went into escrow and closed in August 2025 at $16,750,000.

That’s more than $11 million below the original asking price, and more than $6 million below the reduced price.

This was not my listing. It was handled by a brokerage team based outside the South Bay, and from my perspective, the initial pricing strategy did not serve the seller well. I can’t know everything that went into the seller’s decisions, and no single factor explains a result like that. But on the Manhattan Beach Strand, knowing the nearby sales is only part of the job. You also need a feel for how local buyers, and the agents who represent them, judge a home: which stretches of the Strand, which views and which floor plans they’ll pay up for, and when an asking price stops looking ambitious and starts looking stale.

In my opinion, it’s a clear illustration of the risk of a “list it high and come down later” strategy. When a listing starts far above where the market sees it, the gap can be hard to close on the way back down.

For the buyer, I think it was a great deal: a home of that size on the south end of the Strand, at that price. For the seller, it’s the kind of outcome I’d want to help any client avoid.

Who Really Sets Record Prices in the South Bay?

So if pricing high usually isn’t how records happen, how do they happen?

In my experience, record prices are usually set by the buyer community, not by the seller’s asking price.

We’ve seen it in hot markets. Sometimes those markets are driven by the broader economy. Sometimes they’re driven by a temporary shortage of homes for sale meeting strong demand. Either way, the pattern is similar. We still see some homes selling over their asking price today.

When a seller sets a realistic price, one the market sees as fair, and three, four, five or ten buyers become interested in the same home, there often seems to be at least one buyer in that group who’s willing to step up. For that buyer, price isn’t the most important thing. They want that house, they want it now, they want it for a particular reason, and they’re going to make it happen.

Why Do Buyers Pay More When They Compete?

Here’s something I’ve seen time and time again. Buyers don’t seem to mind paying more when they’re competing against another buyer. What they don’t like is feeling they’re overpaying when they’re only negotiating against the seller.

In a multiple-offer situation, buyers have a certain comfort. Yes, they may be offering more than the market value appears to be. But they know someone else is willing to buy the same house for only a little less. That other buyer is a kind of reassurance. It tells them they aren’t alone in how they see the home.

When a buyer is negotiating one on one against a seller’s high asking price, there’s no such reassurance. Every dollar feels like a concession, and many buyers would rather walk away.

That’s why, in my opinion, the best chance of maximizing a sale price usually comes from creating real competition among buyers, not from asking for a number the market hasn’t seen.

“Buyers don’t seem to mind paying more when they’re competing against another buyer.”

How Did a Confidential Manhattan Beach Teardown Draw Seven Offers?

I want to share one example, without the address, because the sale process has been kept confidential.

It was an exceptional property in Manhattan Beach, and it was a teardown. This was years ago. What made it special was the lot, one of the largest to come up for sale in a very long time. It was highly sought after.

We priced it strategically, at about $2.5 million, where we believed its actual value was. The comparable sales supported that number up and down the board.

We received seven offers. As the listing agent, we kept the offers confidential and didn’t share where any other offers were coming in. Buyers were told only when offers were due, so each one had to decide on their own what the property was worth to them.

Six of the seven offers came in between about $2.5 million and $2.6 million. To me, that established clearly what a fair value was. It’s what those buyers independently agreed on.

The seventh offer stood out. It came in at $3.2 million from a buyer who really wanted that property. For that buyer, price wasn’t the main issue. They were going to pay what the lot was worth to them, and they stepped up.

The sellers accepted that offer. We didn’t need to go back to every buyer with a round of best-and-final counteroffers, which can be a frustrating process for everyone involved.

That strategy worked in that particular case. Every sale is different, and I wouldn’t promise the same result on any other property. But it shows what can happen when a home is priced where the market sees fair value and buyers compete for it.

Should You Price High or Price at Fair Value?

When you’re choosing how to price your home, you can look at both options honestly.

Option one: price above anything that’s been achieved. If you choose this, you need to be prepared for two possibilities. You may have to be willing not to sell if the market doesn’t get there. Or, if selling really matters to you, you may have to be willing to reduce the price significantly to get the activity back.

Option two: price at a level the market sees as fair, and let buyers compete. This doesn’t guarantee a bidding war or a record. Sometimes one good offer is all that comes. But it gives buyers a reason to come in, and it gives the market a chance to push the price up on its own.

Which one fits depends on the situation. I’d say there are certain unique, truly exceptional properties where it can be worth taking the risk and putting a bold number out there, even when the price doesn’t line up with the comparable sales. Those are rare properties and rare occasions.

Questions to Ask Before You Price for a Record

If you’re thinking about selling and wondering whether your home could set a record, these are some of the questions I’d want to talk through:

• What are the closest comparable sales, and how truly comparable are they?
• What features does your home have that are genuinely hard to find: the lot, the location, the views, the condition, the design?
• If the market doesn’t meet your price, are you prepared to wait, or to reduce?
• How important is timing to you?
• Would your home be better served by a broad marketing campaign, or by a more private approach?
• What price would make buyers feel they need to act now?

The Bottom Line

Records are rarely set by asking for them. In my experience, they’re usually set when buyers believe a home is fairly priced and decide they don’t want to lose it to someone else.

There’s no guarantee of a record. The market decides, and every home and every moment is different. But when buyers sense fair value, they tend to come. And when they compete, they can take a price further than an asking price might have.

Not every home draws a premium, and I’ll always tell you honestly where yours stands. But if you’ve ever quietly thought, “I’m not selling my house. ...Unless someone meets my buy-it-now price,” the box below is for you.

 

Sources and notes: Sky Pine Estate (Worley, Idaho): $30 million list price, $27.5 million sale closed Dec. 2, 2020, the 16,620-square-foot home, the 2,400-square-foot boathouse, the helipad and the two hangars at Coeur d’Alene Airport, as reported by the Idaho Statesman, KREM (citing Mansion Global), Robb Report and Realtor.com. “Most expensive home ever sold in Idaho” is as reported at the time. 108 The Strand (Manhattan Beach): original list $27,995,000 (Jan. 20, 2025), reduced to $22,995,000, closed $16,750,000 (Aug. 20, 2025), 6,910 sq ft, built 2014, from public MLS listing histories; listing brokerage per public listing credits. The confidential Manhattan Beach sale is described from Ed Kaminsky’s records and recollection; the address and date are withheld, and figures are approximate. Opinions are Ed Kaminsky’s. Nothing here is an appraisal or a value opinion for any specific property.

Photo credits: Rocket Bay cover art, Kaminsky Real Estate Group. Sky Pine Estate aerial and beachfront home photo: supplied by Ed Kaminsky. Headshot: Ed Kaminsky.

About the author

Ed Kaminsky has been selling South Bay real estate since 1987, with over $4B in closed transactions.

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Ed Kaminsky | Kaminsky Real Estate Group | eXp Luxury

310.307.2224 | ITZSOLD.COM