What Showing Feedback Really Means
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
(Hint: It’s Almost Always About Price)
After a showing, every seller wants to know the same thing:
“What did they say?”
And the feedback often sounds like this:
“It needs more updating than they want to take on.”
“They prefer a one-story layout.”
“They’re hoping for four bedrooms.”
“The floor plan feels a little closed off.”
“The kitchen isn’t as open as they’d like.”
On the surface, those comments feel specific to your home.
But in reality? They are almost always tied to price.
Buyers Don’t Judge Homes in Isolation
Buyers shop by price bracket. When someone is approved up to $900,000, they aren’t just evaluating your home. They are evaluating every home they’ve seen at $900,000.
That means your home is being compared to:
The renovated home with a brand-new kitchen
The one-story that offers a more open floor plan with same bedrooms/bathrooms and square footage
The newer construction with impact windows/doors
The property offering an additional bedroom
So when a buyer says, “It’s more renovation work than we want,” what they’re really saying is:
“At this price, we’re seeing homes that require less updating.”
When they say, “We prefer a one-story,” it often means:
“At this price point, we prefer a one-story option after experiencing how the spaces feel different.”
When they say, “We want four bedrooms,” it usually translates to:
“For this amount of money, there are homes offering more space.”
Price Determines Your Competition
Your price decides which homes you sit next to in a buyer’s search results.
It determines:
Who tours your home
What expectations they bring with them
How critically they evaluate features
Whether your finishes feel “charming” or “dated”
Whether your layout feels “cozy” or “closed off”
At one price, the home feels like a value.At another, it feels like a compromise.
The house hasn’t changed - the competitive set has.
The Frustrating Feedback
There’s another part of showing feedback that can be especially frustrating for sellers.
Sometimes buyers say things like:
“We really want a one-story.”
“We need four bedrooms.”
“We don’t want a fixer.”
And you can’t help but think… that was obvious before they walked in.
The listing clearly shows it’s two stories.The bedroom count is in bold.The photos reflect the condition.
As a seller, you’ve cleaned, staged, coordinated your schedule, stepped out for the showing - only to hear feedback about something that never changed. That frustration is completely understandable.
But even here, price is often quietly involved. Sometimes buyers stretch outside their stated criteria because they’re trying to see what their budget will buy. They’re testing trade-offs. They’re wondering:
“If this were priced differently, would we overlook the stairs?”“If it were positioned as a value, would the updates feel manageable?”
When the answer is no, they default back to their original preferences.
It’s not always logical - and it’s rarely personal - but it’s part of how buyers process value in real time.
It’s also worth remembering that buyers and their agents are usually trying to be polite. Very few people want to say, “We think it’s overpriced.” So instead, the feedback often comes wrapped in softer language - “It’s just not quite for us,” “It needs more updating than we’d like,” or “We’re going to keep looking.” Agents, too, are mindful of relationships and delivery. The result is that pricing concerns are often communicated indirectly. When you read between the lines, many of those comments are simply courteous ways of saying the value didn’t align with the expectation at that price point.
The Psychology of Expectations
Buyers subconsciously assign expectations based on price before they ever step inside.
If a home is priced at the top of a range, they expect:
Updated kitchens and baths
Modern finishes
Open flow
Minimal projects
If those expectations aren’t met, the brain frames the gap as a pricing issue - even if the home is wonderful in many other ways.
That’s why feedback often sounds like it’s about features… when it’s really about perceived value.
How We Use Feedback Strategically
Feedback is not something to dismiss. It’s data. If one buyer mentions layout or condition, that’s preference.If five buyers mention layout or condition, that’s market positioning. If multiple buyers feel the home is “too much work,” it doesn’t automatically mean you need to renovate. It may mean we need to reposition the homes price to better align with the competition and the buyer perceived value.
There’s a hard truth in shifting markets that sellers need to understand: you don’t get credit for “eventually” getting to the right price. Sometimes sellers see the data, but choose to start higher hoping the market will prove stronger than the numbers suggest. The challenge is that when the home sits and the feedback consistently points to value, the market is already giving its answer. By the time a seller agrees to reduce to the original recommended price, the market may have softened further - meaning that price is no longer the right price. In effect, you end up in the same position you were trying to avoid: still overpriced, but now with added days on market and diminished leverage. In a softening environment, price reductions don’t rewind the clock. They simply meet today’s reality - and sometimes today’s reality is lower than yesterday’s. Leading the market protects value. Chasing it almost always costs more.
But almost always, the root comes back to alignment between condition, competition, and price.
The Bottom Line
Every home will sell at the price where buyers feel the value makes sense.
Your home is not competing against perfection. It’s competing against alternatives within the same price bracket.
When price and positioning align, feedback shifts from:
“We wish it had…”
to
“How quickly can we write?”
And that’s always the goal.
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