What to do when my listing expires?
by Dean Paul Dominguez, Realtor Broker and Educator

Many sellers may experience an expiration of their listing. This means that nobody bought the house and the listing period between the seller and the listing agent has ended. So what should a seller do when this happens?
A seller’s goal is to sell the house, so the seller needs to get to the bottom of why the house did not sell. Agents don’t want listings to expire for obvious reasons. Agents want to help sellers sell the house, and they also want to do their job well. When a listing expires, I argue that there was some kind of miscommunication between seller and listing agent that everything was OK, but was not.
One of the most common reasons a listing does not sell is because of price. The listing is overpriced and fairly priced substitutes exist in the market that buyers would rather pay for. When a listing is overpriced, there is a very specific phenomenon that occurs: thousands upon thousands of automatic notifications go out to clients each day from various websites or directly from their agents. When a listing is overpriced, the pricing may exceed the buyers’ maximum price, determined by the loan qualification or by their savings. The exposure of the listing decreases dramatically and nobody gets to see the house.
Why do I say there is a miscommunication between seller and listing agent? The listing agent has the onus of bringing to the attention of the seller that the listing is overpriced. If the listing agent does not do this and fears that the listing will not be theirs if they come forward with the truth, then the miscommunication has already started from the beginning.
But while I know it’s easy to pin all the blame down on the listing agent, the seller must meet the listing agent halfway. When presented with evidence that the price of the house is within a certain range, the seller needs to keep an open mind about price for the sake of selling the house.
It’s scary when sellers don’t want to disclose material facts about the house because they don’t want to lower their price (i.e. this is grounds for a lawsuit, without a doubt), but thankfully we’re not doing something so severe here. What we are dealing with is the seller’s unwillingness to lower the price when the seller is told the listing is overpriced.
The listing agent does not single-handedly need to be the one to tell it straight to the seller that the listing is overpriced if it wasn’t already done so at the listing presentation; the listing agent, through many broker’s tours and open houses, will have no trouble calling the agents up to find out what their clients thought of the listing. Through a process of polling via the business cards of other agents who visited the property, it can be easily demonstrated that the price change needs to occur.
The reason why I focus on overpriced listings being expired, even though it can be the case that other reasons may loom large in the face of an expired listing is because people will always buy real estate at the right price, no matter what. Even if the basement is flooded with sewage and a tree fell on the roof, there is still an appropriate price that one can assign to that listing.
So after a seller’s listing expires, it’s up to the seller to find a new agent. The seller won’t have to look high and low for agents who will solicit the expired listing, based on the area in which you are located, but the next agent should know that the listing expired and the seller needs to be upfront about what transpired beforehand. Doing this starts all conversations with the kind of transparency that is needed when selling your house in real estate.