Short answer, on pricing strategy: listing a property below its likely value, on purpose, can net more than listing at value, because competition raises prices in a way negotiation never will. I call it Spark Pricing, and this New Harmony property is the story I tell to explain it: priced deliberately low, a parade of showings, and a sale 24% over asking with no concessions.
This family found me on Google. No referral, no friend of a friend, just a search from a family who needed help and a decision to trust what they read. I have never taken that trust lightly, and this is the sale where I hope I earned it most visibly.
Their mother was still living on the property in New Harmony, the beautiful little town tucked near the Black Ridge between St George and Cedar City, a solid thirty-minute drive from St George if you are not already familiar with it. It was the forever home she and her husband had spent decades building a life in, once their pride and joy. He had passed, and in her later years the home had simply become too much, the way it eventually does. It is not that they stopped caring for the house. At some point your body just does not let you anymore, and the deferred maintenance piles up quietly until the list is longer than the Costco line on a Saturday. In a buyer's eyes, that list can make a home look almost worthless. The family wanted their energy going to Mom, not to an aging property. And the property itself was overwhelming them: a house, a garage, and land all full of the accumulation of decades, with no idea where to start. What they did know, without a doubt, was that this property was worth more than the condition of the house sitting on it.
The family did real work, and it should be said plainly: they went above and beyond. When we first met, I made them the same offer I make every family: take what matters to you, and I will take care of the rest. But hardworking people who are not used to asking for help often cannot quite bring themselves to accept that, and this family felt the work was theirs to do. So they did it. They ran their own estate sale. They cleared out what they could, filled a dumpster, and got their mom moved into town before a single showing. They did 95% of it on pure grit and determination, and if you have ever emptied a family property, you know the truth about the last 5%: it feels like the weight of the world, and you start to wonder if you will ever be done. That is exactly where I take the baton. By the time buyers arrived, the family had already carried the heaviest boxes, literal and otherwise.
Then came the part that was ours: figuring out what this property actually was. And the honest answer was that the house was in genuinely rough shape, close to a teardown. I did nothing to the inside, because nothing done to that inside would have come back. What the property had was everything around the house: seven tenths of an acre, Zion views that stop you where you stand, and an oversized detached garage of more than a thousand square feet. The land, the utilities, and that garage were worth the asking price on their own.
So that is what we sold. Not one listing photo showed the inside of that house. Not one second of video. Every frame and every line of the marketing sold the view, the land, and the garage, so no buyer could drag us into a circular negotiation over a structure that did not matter to the value. As far as the marketing was concerned, the house came free.
Then the pricing, which is where this story becomes the one I tell most often. Most sales I represent close at an average of 99.9% of list price, for an unexciting reason: price a home well from the start and buyers come. Usually, holding firm at a well-set number is the right play. But two things were true here. This family did not have time to wait; they wanted this done, for Mom's sake. And every dollar mattered in the most literal sense, because in a move like this one, every dollar a property brings pays for the quality of life of the person moving out of it, the necessities of the rest of her life. A remote property thirty minutes out does not sell by sitting politely at the right price. The question was never how to defend a number. It was how to get a lot of people to stop what they were doing and drive out here to look. That is where a different strategy came in, one I have used enough times since that I gave it a name: Spark Pricing. I had a number in mind that I believed the property would ultimately bring. The conventional move is to list at that number and wait for one buyer to appear and negotiate you down from it. I recommended the opposite: list dramatically below it, at a price where, in Southern Utah, you could barely buy a condo. The price is the spark. My reasoning to the family was exactly this: all I need is two people. If I can get two people who want it, the competition catches, and I can get the price higher. And if I cannot, then the market has spoken and we have lost nothing but a bad assumption.
They said yes to a strategy that sounds, on its face, like giving money away. That yes took nerve, and everything that followed belongs to it.
We set a date to review all offers at once, and the showings came like a parade. Buyers drove the thirty minutes. Then more buyers drove the thirty minutes. And remember what they were driving to: a property whose house needed serious work. That is the power of visible value. Buyers scan the market every single day, and when something real shows up, they recognize it instantly, and they act. Interest ran so hot that a few times we held open houses during the window just to get everyone through at once. And the window itself was a strategy, not a formality. Hold it too short and you leave money on the table, because serious buyers never got their chance. Hold it too long and buyers turn anxious; the suspense starts to feel like a game being played at their expense, and they walk. Ours ran exactly long enough for interested buyers to see the property more than once, look closely at what they would want to repair, and factor all of it into their offers, because the goal was one price and no second negotiation.
One set of buyers came to me directly, and I referred them to my partner David Busk, who knows that rural country like his own backyard, to represent them. I avoid dual agency on principle: a buyer and a seller each deserve someone whose only job is to be their champion, not a shared neutral in the middle completing the paperwork. Those buyers, with David solely in their corner, ultimately won the property, and the family, with me solely in theirs, won the price. That is what two champions look like.
When the review date arrived, there were multiple offers on the table, and the competition did what competition does.
The property sold 24% over its asking price, with no concessions, under contract in 9 days and closed in about a month. Sit with that percentage for a second: the winning number was nearly a quarter again above the list price. That is not a negotiating rounding error. That is the size of the prize competition builds when a property is priced to create it. And the nine days were not nine days because anyone rushed; they were nine days because the window stayed open long enough for every serious buyer to be sure.
I will tell you the truth about this sale: it was flat-out fun. It was also genuinely scary for the family. Saying yes to that price felt like trusting a Hail Mary with their mother's largest asset, and they said yes anyway. So when the final number landed, they just giggled. There is no other word for it. After all that grit and all that worry, this family stood there giggling at what their nerve had earned, and it was adorable.
There was one more mercy hidden in the outcome: the buyers negotiated to rent their own dumpster and dispose of everything the family had left behind. The family never had to go back. Not for one more box.
A Google search, a leap of trust, a strategy that looked backwards and worked exactly as designed. All I needed was two people. The family's nerve brought them a parade.