Ed Neuhaus 
128 Homes in Your Neighborhood Tried. Most Didn’t Sell.
Between January and April of 2025, 128 homes in zip codes 78738, 78734, and 78620 were either withdrawn or expired without selling. Average days on market: 130 days. Average list price: around $1.4 million. Most of them weren’t expired. They were withdrawn. Meaning the sellers pulled them. After four months of nothing, they just… gave up.
If your home was one of them, I want you to know something first: this is not a reflection of your house. It’s not a reflection of your judgment or your taste or how well you kept the place up. The 2025 market in this part of Austin was genuinely brutal for sellers in the $750K-$2M range. You weren’t imagining it. The numbers confirm it.
But that was then. Spring 2026 is a different conversation, and if you’re thinking about trying again, I want to walk through exactly what happened, what’s changed, and what a real re-listing strategy looks like. Not a pitch. Just an honest look at the situation, like I’d have with any client sitting across from me.
Why Your Home Didn’t Sell (The Real Reasons)
This is the hard part. Most agents won’t say this out loud, but I’d rather have this conversation with you now than have you repeat the same mistakes in a new listing.
Pricing: The First Two Weeks Are Everything
About 70% of failed listings come down to one thing: the price was wrong from day one. Not wildly wrong. Just wrong enough. In 2025, buyers had options. Lots of them. When a home hit the market overpriced by even 5-10%, buyers scrolled past it. They had 13,000+ active listings to choose from across the metro. Why fight for a house that’s asking too much when there are ten others in the same neighborhood?
Here’s what happens when you’re overpriced at launch: you get a flood of showings in week one (those are buyers checking you out, not buyers considering you seriously), then nothing. By week three, agents are showing the home to justify it in client presentations. “See, this is why we’re not offering over $1.1M on the other house. Look how long this one has been sitting.” Your listing becomes a comparison tool for your neighbors.
By week six, the price drop happens. But now the listing has 45 days of DOM attached to it. Buyers ask “what’s wrong with it?” and nothing you say fully answers that question. The damage is done.
And yes, the data backs this up. In 2025, 69% of homes that sold in the Austin metro sold below their original list price. The average sold-to-list ratio was 97%. That means the market was already offering sellers a 3% discount from their asking price, and that’s the SUCCESSFUL sales. The ones that didn’t sell were priced even further out of range.
Photos and Marketing: This One Actually Matters More Than You Think
I’ve been selling homes in Austin for 19 years and the gap between good marketing and bad marketing has never been wider. In 2025 and 2026, buyers are doing 90% of their decision-making online before they ever schedule a showing. If your listing photos were shot with an agent’s phone, or if there was no video walkthrough, or if the floor plan was missing, you lost buyers before they ever called.
This sounds harsh. It’s true. A buyer sitting in San Francisco deciding whether to fly to Austin for a week of showings is not going to schedule yours if the photos don’t deliver. And in the 78738 and 78734 zip codes, where you’re competing against $1M+ homes, “fine” photography is not fine. Professional photography, drone footage, and a video tour are table stakes now, not upgrades.
Condition and Staging: The Online Comparison Problem
Here’s something that changed dramatically in the last few years: buyers now compare every home they tour against every other home they’ve toured online. If they walked through a competing listing that had fresh paint, updated fixtures, and staged furniture, and then walked through yours with dated counters, half-empty closets, and personal photos everywhere, you lost that buyer.
Staging doesn’t mean spending $50,000 on renovations. It means presenting the house the way it would look in a magazine. Decluttered, clean sightlines, neutral scents, every light on. Staged homes sell 73% faster, and that stat has only gotten more relevant as buyer expectations have shifted upward.
Timing: Sometimes You Just Hit a Wall
The 2025 spring market in Austin started strong and fell off a cliff around May. If your home went active in April and didn’t get an offer by early May, you were suddenly competing in a completely different market environment. Rising inventory, falling urgency, and buyers who’d been burned by rushing in 2021-2022 now taking their sweet time.
This wasn’t your fault. But it does mean that “we listed at the wrong time” is sometimes a legitimate factor, not an excuse.
Agent Strategy: Not Every Agent Markets the Same Way
I’ll be direct here because the truth is useful. There’s a massive range in how agents market homes in this price range. Some agents are excellent at contracts and negotiation but don’t invest in photography, social marketing, or pre-listing buyer outreach. Some are excellent at marketing but miss on pricing. Some do everything right but don’t have relationships with the buyer’s agents who work the most active buyers in these zip codes.
This doesn’t mean your agent was bad. It might mean the strategy wasn’t right for YOUR specific home, at YOUR specific price point, in THIS specific market. That’s a meaningful distinction, and it’s worth examining honestly. The mistakes sellers make are usually a combination of factors, not one single thing.
So What’s Different About Spring 2026?
A few things have genuinely shifted, and I think they matter for sellers who are considering another try.
First, inventory coming to market is actually down. In January 2026, new listings were running about 15% below the same period last year. That means less competition for your home, assuming you price and market it correctly this time. The buyers who are in the market have fewer options to choose from than they did in mid-2025.
Second, under-contract activity is UP 6.9% year-over-year. Buyers are buying. The market is not frozen. What you’re seeing in the 2026 market data is not a shutdown. It’s a correction. Correctly priced homes are moving. Only incorrectly priced homes are sitting.
Third, interest rates are holding around 6-6.5%. They’re not going to drop dramatically in the next six months. Most forecasts have them in this range through the end of 2026. What that means for you: buyers have adjusted to these rates. The “rate shock” paralysis of 2023-2024 has mostly worked its way through the system. Buyers who need to move are moving, rate or no rate.
The opportunity here is a narrow window in late February through April, before summer inventory floods the market. If you’re going to relist, sooner is better, and spring is genuinely the strongest window for homes in the Bee Cave, Lakeway, and Dripping Springs corridor.
The Re-Listing Playbook
Ok, so lets say you’re ready to try again. Here’s what I’d actually do differently.
Step 1: Get a Fresh CMA (Not Last Year’s)
The comps from your first listing are stale. The market shifted enough in 2025 that using last year’s analysis to price a 2026 listing is like driving using yesterday’s map. You need current closed sales from the last 60-90 days, active competition right now, and an honest look at what buyers are actually paying, not asking, in your specific neighborhood.
A current market analysis isn’t just a number. It’s a strategy document. It should tell you the price range where your home competes, where it wins, and where it will sit and rot. The goal is to find the number where a motivated buyer says “yes” within the first three weeks.
Step 2: Professional Photography and Video. Non-Negotiable.
If your original listing had good photos, keep them. If it didn’t, and honestly, if the home sat for 130 days, this is worth evaluating, invest in a full reshoot. New photography, drone footage, and a walkthrough video. In this price range, the marketing investment is trivial compared to the carrying cost of another four months on market.
And while we’re here: the listing description matters too. Not keyword-stuffed garbage, but an actual narrative about what makes the home worth $1.4M. The lifestyle, the location, the specific things that are hard to photograph. Buyers buy stories before they buy houses.
Step 3: Price to Compete, Not to Test
The phrase I hear from sellers before failed listings is some version of: “let’s test the market and see.” I understand the impulse. It’s a big number and you don’t want to leave money on the table. But in a buyer’s market, “testing” costs you more than it saves.
Here’s the math that nobody runs until after: if your home is listed for 130 days at $1.4M and doesn’t sell, you’ve carried it for 4+ months. Property taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities, potential mortgage payments if you’ve already moved. That’s often $15,000-$30,000 in carrying costs, depending on the home. Then you relist at $1.35M (after the price drop you were going to do anyway) and sell in 30 days. You didn’t “save” by starting high. You paid $25,000 for the privilege of finding out what the market already knew.
Price it right the first time. The carrying cost math almost always argues for aggressive pricing at launch over testing.
Step 4: First 14 Days Are Your Only Launch Window
When a home hits the market, it gets one shot at peak attention. Every buyer who’s been searching in your price range and neighborhood gets an alert. Agents with active buyers in that range see it immediately. The showing requests come in, or they don’t. The first 14 days are when you have the most leverage, the most eyeballs, and the best chance of a multiple-offer situation.
Everything in your strategy should be pointed at maximizing those first two weeks. That means you’re not “getting the house ready” after it lists. You’re 100% ready before it lists. Photos done. Staging complete. Pre-listing marketing to buyer’s agents who work your area. Coming soon promotion if your agent does that. And a price that’s going to create urgency, not curiosity.
Step 5: Timing the Re-Launch
This matters more than people think. In the Hill Country corridor, spring is the real estate equivalent of planting season. Families who want to be settled before school starts need to be under contract by May at the latest to close by July-August. That’s your buyer pool. They’re actively searching right now.
List in late February or March and you catch that buyer before the summer inventory surge. List in June and you’re competing against everyone else who waited, in a slower market, with increasingly impatient sellers. The sell-by-summer dynamic in Bee Cave, Lakeway, and Dripping Springs is real, and it favors early movers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Lets Have an Honest Conversation
If your home didn’t sell last year and you’re thinking about trying again, I’d love to sit down with you. Not to pitch you, not to tell you everything was fine when it wasn’t. Just to have a genuinely honest conversation about what happened and what we’d do differently.
Sometimes it’s price. Sometimes it’s marketing. Sometimes it’s a combination of smaller things that added up. Whatever it is, it’s fixable. 128 homes in this corridor didn’t sell in early 2025. Some of those sellers have already moved on. But some of them have great homes that deserved a better outcome, and spring 2026 is a real opportunity to get that outcome.
No obligation, no pressure, just a fresh set of eyes on your specific situation. Reach out to Ed Neuhaus and we’ll figure out if the timing is right and what a realistic strategy looks like for your home.
And if you’re still on the fence about whether to try again at all, I wrote a whole piece on whether to sell now or wait that might help you think through it. Sometimes waiting is the right call. But sometimes the market is quietly telling you something different, and spring 2026 might be that moment.
