Days on market is the honest headline
The most informative number on any listing is days on market, and it usually hides in the fine print. A home that has been listed for two weeks versus two months tells you more about pricing and condition than the asking price does.
Short days on market means the brokers set the price to make the phone ring. Long days on market can mean the opposite, or it can mean a stubborn seller, or a needed repair too big to ignore. Always ask why before you write anything off.
Price per square foot is a rumor
Price per square foot is the most quoted and least reliable metric in real estate, because it ignores everything that actually matters: lot size, view, condition, updates, floor plan, and the street. Two identical square footages can be forty percent apart in value on the same block.
Use price per square foot to compare very similar homes on very similar lots, and treat it as gossip everywhere else.
The disclosure is the truth
In Washington, sellers complete a form disclosure, and that document is where a house's character is revealed. Read it before the open house, not after. Past leaks, roof age, permits pulled or not pulled, neighbor situations: it is all in there, and it is all honest correspondence.
The listings that hide the disclosure until you ask are the listings to ask about first.
Photography is a persuasion, not a promise
Wide-angle lenses are doing heavy lifting on most listing photos. Use the images to narrow your list, then use your feet to make the real decision. The rooms always feel smaller in person than in a wide-angle shot, and closets are almost always tinier than the photo implies.
A rule I live by: if the photos make the same room look different in two different angles, the room is smaller than both of them.
The updates ledger
Look for the pattern in updates, not the count. A house with a new roof, new windows, and a new furnace has a quiet, boring history of maintenance, which is the best story a house can tell. A house with a stunning kitchen and an ancient roof is a story about priorities, and the kitchen is what they chose over the roof.
Neither is wrong. Just know which story you are buying.
About the author
Dawna Capps
Dawna is a Greater Seattle real estate broker with eXp Realty who loves discovering what makes a home—and the community around it—special. Having moved more than thirty times herself, she brings a personal perspective to relocation, homeownership, and finding the right place to call home. She believes real estate information should be easy to understand and useful for the decisions buyers and sellers are making.
