How Much is My Home Worth? Start with Who's Actually Shopping for It.
Your home does not have one fixed price.
What your home may be worth, what someone is willing to pay for it, and whether there is someone currently shopping for what you’ve got are three different questions.
So when you sit down with us to figure out how to price your home, we don’t start with price per square foot. We don’t start with Zillow. And we definitely don’t start with the house down the street that somebody listed for $850,000 last month.
We start here:
Who is actually buying what you’ve got, where are they spending their money, and what are they choosing when they do?
Then we ask a more interesting question.
Can we change where your house competes before we put it up for sale?
Frequently, yes.
Buyers, if you’re reading this too, hold tight. There’s an Easter egg for you at the end.
“But the House Down the Street is Listed For…”
Right.
Have you ever looked at the house down the street and thought, Well, they’re asking $850,000 and ours is nicer?
Fair.
But then we have to ask: How long have they been asking?
Because an active listing tells us what a seller wants. It does not tell us what a buyer has agreed to pay. If that house has been sitting there for 147 days, we probably don’t want to copy their homework.
And this is where pricing a house gets considerably more interesting than pulling three nearby sales, averaging the price per square foot, and handing you a number.
When you sit down with us, we put the evidence in front of you and work through it together. We start broadly. Where are buyers actually transacting? At what prices? What kinds of homes are they choosing at those prices? Where does your house most naturally fit?
You can usually dismiss some price bands pretty quickly. Too low. Too high. Not really the same buyer decision.
But there are almost always two or three worth a second look.
And that’s where the fun starts.
There is No Single "New Orleans Real Estate Market"
Through September 16 of this year (2026) buyers have closed 2,063 residential sales in Orleans Parish. But those buyers are not evenly distributed across price points.
Here’s where they actually bought:
Sale Price 2026 Orleans Parish Sales
Under $200K 418
$200K–$299K 390
$300K–$399K 356
$400K–$599K 307
$600K–$799K 221
$800K–$999K 145
$1M+ 226
Those are seven very different competitive environments. The original MLS report breaks them down even further, and the differences get more interesting the closer you look.
.
That’s why “What’s the average home price?” is rarely the question I’m most interested in.
I want to know:
Where are the buyers for this house?
What else can they buy with the same money?
What are they choosing?
What are they rejecting?
How quickly are the good ones moving?
What does a buyer get for $450K that they don’t get for $400K?
What starts showing up at $600K?
What do the houses selling at $900K have in common?
If we want your house competing there, does it belong there now?
And if not—
What would have to change?
Study What Buyers Paid. Not Just What Sellers Asked.
Now we narrow the group. We look at the homes buyers actually chose and ask what they truly sold for. Not just the number on the sign.
What was the final asking price when the buyer engaged?
What did the buyer actually pay?
What concessions were involved?
How much negotiating happened at the table?
How long did it take?
Then we look at the houses themselves.
What did they offer?
What seems to have motivated the buyer?
How were they presented?
What did the photography make obvious?
What did the copy make obvious?
What did those houses have that yours doesn’t?
And—much more importantly—which of those differences can we solve?
This is also why we study active listings differently from sold listings.
Active listings tell us about competition.
Sold listings tell us about selection.
And failed listings?
Oh, those are useful too.
Someone Else Already Paid the Tuition
Through September 16, there have been 1,480 expired residential listing attempts in Orleans Parish. That does not mean 1,480 unique houses—properties can expire and relist—but it does mean the market has given us 1,480 unsuccessful attempts to learn from this year alone.
So if your listing isn’t working, or your first attempt didn’t work, you are very much not alone.
And no, I don’t think we should look away from those listings because they “failed.”
Someone else already paid the tuition. We might as well go to class.
Why didn’t buyers choose them?
Was it price?
Presentation?
Condition?
A confusing floor plan?
Bad photography?
Too much uncertainty?
A house that required so much imagination that buyers started mentally subtracting money before they even got through the front door?
You do not have to wait until your own house has been sitting on the market for six months to learn these things.
The market has already run thousands of experiments for us.
Let’s use them.
Your House Doesn’t Necessarily Have to Stay Where It Is
This is the part I think homeowners are too rarely invited into.
Once we understand where your house competes today, we can look one level up.
What are buyers getting there?
What would your house need to offer to be a credible choice among those homes?
And is the gap actually solvable?
Maybe the answer is no. A $200,000 renovation to chase another $75,000 in value is not a strategy. That’s just expensive optimism.
But maybe the difference is paint. Maybe it’s a doorway.
Maybe it’s landscaping.
Maybe buyers can’t figure out what one room is supposed to be.
Maybe the house is beautifully maintained but so full of furniture that nobody can see its scale.
Maybe the expensive work has already been done, but buyers have no way to know that because it’s hidden behind drywall or under the home.
Maybe nothing physical needs to change, and we simply need to have a kind, honest conversation about price.
Do the amount of work the evidence justifies.
Every house does not need to be fully prepped.
Every house needs to be positioned.
We’ve Been Testing This Ourselves
I started developing what became our current positioning and Prepped to Sell methodology about a year ago. So I’m not going to pretend we have a 20-year longitudinal study sitting over here.
We don’t.
But I was crunching our year-to-date numbers this week and found something that made me feel like we weren’t just onto something out in front of us. We’d already done the work. We were the case study.
Across the eight sales this year where we can clearly identify meaningful use of the positioning process—from seller-executed plans to full concierge Prepped to Sell—8 out of 8 closed at 98% or better of our final list price. Five sold at or above list. Collectively, they closed at 98.98%.
And this isn't eight versions of the same easy little house.
They range from $285,000 to $1.53 million. Condos. Historic houses. Different neighborhoods. Different agents. Different sellers. Different amounts of work.
Some sellers took our step-by-step DIY plan and ran with it themselves. Some wrote a check and handed us the keys. Some needed very little physical prep at all.
Two had already spent roughly six months on the market with another agent without selling before we repositioned them.
Then they sold.
Our office production records confirm the underlying final-list-to-sale results across this group, including sales at 100% or better and the $1.5M Esplanade closing at 98.04% of our final list price.
Small sample?
Absolutely.
Consistent? Hell yes.
And no, I am not telling you that painting your living room magically makes your house sell for 98.98% of asking.
That would be ridiculous.
I’m telling you that positioning is a process, and the early results have made us even more disciplined about using it.
Price is Only One Part of Positioning
Once you decide to sell, your home is still your home. It is also about to become a product entering a marketplace. Products get go-to-market strategies.
So should houses.
For us, positioning has three big moving parts:
Pricing determines where we’re asking buyers to consider you.
Presentation determines what they perceive when they get there.
Promotion determines whether the right buyers encounter the property and understand why they should care.
And the biggest flex, when the evidence supports it, can be with the product itself.
What can we change, reasonably, that materially improves the likelihood that a buyer selects this house over the other things they can buy with the same money?
That’s the question behind Prepped to Sell.
Promotion? I'm Keeping a Few Cards
I’m not going to give you every one of our secrets about promotion here. But if you’re reading this article, there is a decent chance you are already benefiting from our ability to promote content, our brand, and our marketplace.
Thanks for tuning in.
The important part is that promotion cannot indefinitely compensate for a product the market doesn’t select. You can get a million eyeballs on the wrong proposition. You still have the wrong proposition.
Our job is to put pricing, presentation and promotion together so that when the right buyer encounters your house, the decision makes sense.
So, How Much is Your Home Worth?
There isn't one magical number sitting inside the house waiting for an appraiser or Realtor to discover it.
What we know:
There is a market.
There are buyers making choices inside that market.
There is a competitive position your house occupies today.
And, within reason, there are choices you can make before selling that can change that position.
What we can’t do:
We cannot manufacture a buyer who does not exist.
We cannot promise you your dream number any more than we can promise a buyer their perfect dream house.
What we can do:
Study the evidence.
Figure out where buyers are actually spending
Understand what they're selecting
Determine what is within your control
Make deliberate decisions designed to improve the odds of selling—and selling for the strongest number the market will support.
We particularly like doing that with sellers who want to get the most they reasonably can from the investment they’ve already made.
It’s a puzzle.
We like puzzles.
Yes, We Put the Methodology in a Book
If you’ve spent much time around Cool Murphy, you’ve probably figured out that we’re not particularly interested in guarding the information.
Discovering it, hard. Sharing it, easy.
Reading it, easy. Implementing it? That’s a lot of work.
So yes, we put the whole Prepped to Sell methodology in a book. You can get the e-book, or we’ll ship the hardcover—the one with a few things in it we don't give away quite as freely—straight to your door.
Or, obviously, you can call us and we’ll do this with you.
👀 You can find Prepped to Sell on Amazon here.
P.S. Buyers—I Promised You an Easter Egg
Go back to the listings you’ve been scrolling past.
The one with terrible photos.
The one with way too much furniture.
The weird paint.
The room nobody can figure out.
The listing that has been sitting there forever.
The house where the value simply hasn’t been made obvious.
Now ask yourself:
What if I can see past it?
Because everything we just taught sellers works in reverse.
A house that has been beautifully positioned is easy for buyers to understand.
A house that hasn't been?
Well.
Sometimes that's where the opportunity is.
This year, across nearly a dozen residential purchases in our own buyer book, our clients closed a combined $160,400 below the sellers’ final list prices—an average difference of about $14,582 per purchase. Some deals were at list. One was above it. Others had considerably more room.
The lesson isn't offer low.
The lesson is the same one we've been talking about this whole time:
Understand what you're looking at before you decide what it's worth.
Sometimes the opportunity is the house whose seller didn't read this article.
Want us to show you how it works, or what it could be? We’re here for that too!
Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.
Contact Her -
email: cool@coolmurphy.com
Facebook: @homeinneworleans
IG: @coolmurphynola
YouTube: @coolmurphynola
phone: 504-321-3194
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