What Happens After You List Your House?
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about what happens before your house hits the market (check out out last couple posts here and here).
First, we talked about what to do before you list your house—what’s worth doing, what isn’t, and how we figure out the difference. Then we talked about what your house is actually worth—not just what a comp says or what an algorithm spits out, but how buyers make choices and how we position a house to compete for one.
If you’re joining us here, you don’t need to go back and do the homework first. Here’s what you need to know: at Cool Murphy, we approach bringing a house to market through what we call the 3Ps: Position, Prep and Promote.
We’ve done everything in our control, within reason, to understand your home, your buyer, a strategic list price, and how to make the home appeal to that buyer online and in person. We’ve positioned it. We’ve prepped it. We’ve got it out in the world, and we’re following a promotion plan designed to maximize all that work.
None of this means that if you position, prep and promote a home perfectly, it will sell for top dollar. That’s snake oil. Our job is to increase your odds.
We start from the most grounded, educated position we can, using everything we know before the house hits the market. But eventually, the theory has to meet the market. And when it does, our job is to keep learning.
The sign is up. The MLS is live. The launch is done.
So what happens after we plan? Do we just chill? Do we report back saying, “I’m seeing what you’re seeing”? Or, “Nothing else is selling either”?
No.
I have a very experienced—and, might I add, much appreciated—client named Crawford. To say selling is not his first rodeo is an understatement. Over the years, he’s lived in multiple places and sold in multiple locations and markets. And upon finding his way back home to New Orleans, he’s taken on some serious renovation projects. Not the cheap-flip kind. The get this milled right kind.
When we first met to talk about selling his house, it was a very tough, very stuck market. And the home he was looking to sell, a stunner? It had been stuck for six months.
Here’s what he told me:
“I know nothing else is selling. I can see that. I’m aware. I don’t need to hear that. What I need to hear is, how do I become the first property sold when someone does buy, or at least the first three?”
That hit me in the chest. Not like a cannonball, but in an OMG, I see you. Do you see me? kind of way.
Because it’s exactly how I think.
Crawford wasn’t asking me whether the market was stuck. He already knew that. He wanted to know how to be the first choice when somebody did buy.
Well, you’ve got to know what you’re up against.
Think of it like waiting on the call to the dance. The solds tell us who got asked. The actives tell us how many are still standing around waiting for the phone to ring.
Price Band | Sold | Active |
Under $200K | 197 | 500 |
$200K - $299K | 195 | 557 |
$300K - $399K | 161 | 442 |
$400K - $599K | 151 | 427 |
$600K - $799K | 88 | 256 |
$800K - $999K | 44 | 88 |
$1M+ | 75 | 213 |
Who Got Asked to Dance—And Who's Still Waiting?
In almost every broad price range right now, there are roughly two-and-a-half to three homes actively waiting to be chosen for every one that buyers selected over the entire previous 90 days.
That’s the game we’re playing.
Not is anything selling?
How do we put your house in the best possible position to be selected next?
I spent 12 years in Manhattan business development across advertising, publishing and tech. “Well, nothing else is selling” wasn’t in the vocabulary. It was: What can we make or find that will sell? And we better be damn sure it will.
So I got that listing. We ran it through the 3Ps, and a home that had been sitting for six months went under contract in under three weeks.
But what happens when we get to the third week? The sixth week?
It happens. And it’s frustrating.
And how do we know whether we need to change something—or what we need to change?
That question is why I invented the Buyer Barometer for real estate. It’s a proprietary Cool Murphy Real Estate tool designed to assess what’s going on post-list so we can learn and pivot.
Back to Advertising 101
To use the Buyer Barometer, you’ve gotta work with—or become—a Cool Murphy agent. But I can tell you where it came from.
It started with a trip back to Tallahassee. Mentally, not actually. Sitting in Advertising 101 in the basement classrooms of Diffenbaugh, learning about the buyer funnel.
Old-school advertising—before tracking pixels, when focus groups gave us the qualitative stuff and Likert scales on surveys were about as quantitative as we got—taught us what we already know but hadn’t necessarily articulated: sales, advertising, marketing, whatever you want to call it, begins with awareness.
The customer has to be aware of what you have to buy it.
Simple, right?
It’s how advertising became a billion-plus-dollar industry. It’s why we have Super Bowl ads. It’s what Zillow does. It’s what postcards do. It’s what every social media here’s this house post is trying to do.
Make people aware the sucker is for sale.
From there, the logic goes something like this:
1. Awareness: Does he know I exist?
People have to encounter the house before they can possibly buy it.
2. Intrigue: Does he like me? Like, really like me?
Now that people are seeing it, are they leaning in? There are loads of surface-level metrics for this. None involves passing a note in class that says circle one: yes or no. But Zillow saves, Realtor.com activity, MLS activity and other quantitative metrics become useful yardsticks for how deeply we’re getting beyond awareness.
3. Consideration: Does he like me enough to ask me out?
People like people all the time. But enough to put their ego and time on the line and ask for that first date? Oof. That’s different. Anyone with a dating app on their phone probably “swipes right” on Realtor.com, too, and doesn’t follow through. In real estate, this is where buyers start giving us something more valuable than a click: their time. They show up and walk through the door, or at least send someone through with FaceTime.
4. Conversion: Is he going to make a move?
Showings are great. But now what? Do they follow up? Come back? Ask questions? Write an offer? At some point, interest has to turn into action.
That’s the basic logic behind the Buyer Barometer. We look at the evidence and ask where buyers are getting stuck along the way.
Awareness? Intrigue? Consideration? Conversion?
Seems easy enough.
It’s not.
Because now we have to graduate from the nice linear journey we learned in Advertising 101 to something that looks a lot more like the way actual people make decisions.
But They Said They Loved My House. When Are They Writing An Offer?
Welcome to the messy middle.
We didn’t coin that term. Google did.
In 2020, Google published a fascinating piece of research called Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle. They were trying to understand what actually happens between the moment someone is triggered to consider buying something and the moment they finally buy it.
And they didn’t just ask people what they thought they did. The research included hundreds of hours of shopping observations, search-trend analysis, behavioral-science literature reviews and a large-scale experiment involving more than 30,000 purchase simulations.
What they found was that the nice, neat funnel we learned in Advertising 101 gets pretty messy in the middle.
People tend to loop between two modes. Google calls them exploration and evaluation.
Exploration is expansive: What are my options? What else is out there? What haven’t I considered?
Evaluation is reductive: Which of these is actually right for me? Which can I eliminate? Which one wins?
And around and around we go.
The internet makes this particularly interesting because there are now nearly endless things to explore and nearly endless ways to evaluate them. Reviews. Searches. Photos. Videos. Opinions. Another search. Another option you hadn’t considered. Back to the first one.
Preferences in this middle ground can be surprisingly fluid.
Which, if you’ve ever opened 14 tabs to buy something you absolutely did not need 14 tabs to buy, probably tracks.
And before you ask why someone hasn’t written an offer on your house, or what happened to that couple who said they loved it, think about the last time you bought something that actually mattered.
Think about your own messy middle before you decided to list your house. How long did you think about selling before you called someone? How many houses did you look at before you bought this one? What did you swear you needed that you eventually decided you didn’t? What did you dismiss and then reconsider? What did you Google? Who did you ask? What changed your mind?
People are messy. So is sales.
And real estate may be one of the messiest versions of it. We’re not selling an unlimited supply of identical products. We have one house, in one location, in one condition, at one price, competing against a bunch of other houses that aren’t identical to it either.
Meanwhile, buyers are exploring, evaluating, changing their criteria, getting new information, touring something they didn’t expect to like, and occasionally buying something that looks almost nothing like what they told their agent they wanted.
The funnel gives us a useful way to ask where buyers are getting stuck.
The messy middle reminds us not to assume we know why.
And when you’re the seller, that why is usually the thing you desperately want to know.
What happened to the people who loved it? Why hasn’t anyone written? What are buyers waiting for?
To get better answers to those questions, a Realtor has got to start asking better questions themselves.
This is Where the Data Gets Useful.
What are buyers actually doing? Where are they stopping? What about the people who saw it but didn’t save it? The people who saved it but never came? The people who came but never followed up? What did they choose instead? Is the same thing happening to our competition? Are we hearing one person’s opinion, or are we starting to see a pattern?
When I started asking those questions—those complicated, business-development, Google-brained questions—something interesting happened.
We got past what people said.
“It needs a lot of work.”
“It’s gorgeous!” Then crickets.
“It just didn’t make the top spot.”
And we started looking at what they did.
That distinction became fundamental to the way we work: we measure buyer behavior, not agent activity.
It’s working smarter, not working more.
Because points on the board don’t matter when the game isn’t Agent Who Does the Most Stuff. The game is get the seller to the closing table with dignity.
Sometimes an open house is exactly what helps us do that. Sometimes it isn’t. If open houses aren’t the thing that improves the situation, doing another one just so we can point to it on an activity report doesn’t get us any closer to the goal.
So here are two instances where we learned valuable lessons the hard way, so you don’t have to. Both predated the Buyer Barometer. Both helped create it.
Let's go back to the basics: what happened with Crawford's house?
When we received the listing contract for Crawford’s house, we had something particularly handy: six months of evidence from the prior listing.
There was awareness. There were saves. There were showings. People knew it existed. Some liked it enough to lean in. Some liked it enough to come through the door.
So where was the logjam?
We did our buyer research, and three things jumped out.
First, there were far more buyers looking up to $600,000 than looking up to $610,000, $650,000 or $700,000. The home had been priced at $609,000.
Hmm.
Would Crawford take an offer for $600,000?
If he would, then let’s adjust the price so the house gets in front of that much larger group of buyers and hold tight to it.
We did.
Second, buyers in that category at the time were often empty nesters looking to relocate here and own a lock-and-leave home. The prior listing had virtually staged a nursery.
It was sooooo cute.
But not really what was going to catch the eye of someone in their late 50s.
And third, the home was stunning. So stunning, in fact, that it was missing some of the bohemian appeal people were looking for in the Bywater. Funky textiles. Retro lighting. Nostalgia. The open floor plan, while amazing, also left people a little confused about what to do where.
So we showed how each room could live for the buyer profile. We brought in eclectic, bohemian staging. We engaged a local Bywater artist to hang art, and we took photos with a certain vibe. Good light. Editorial. A little ooh, I want to see more of that. Funky. Artsy. Very Bywater.
And you know what?
No one wanted to buy all the furniture and move right in.
But they did write offers.
Price mattered. Presentation mattered. Who we were presenting it to mattered.
It wasn’t one lever.
Liberty Oaks taught us something completely different.
Liberty Oaks was a 20-acre horse farm about 15 minutes outside of New Orleans and five minutes from downtown Slidell. It appraised for more than a million dollars and had literally no comps.
Why?
Because nothing else was like it.
Two homes. Four-acre horse pastures, paddocks and stables. A pool. A gazebo. Two boat slips with deep-water access to Liberty Bayou. More than two dozen ancient live oaks. And a 40-yard tunnel of natural bamboo when you drove in.
I mean...
This wasn’t nothing in your neighborhood is quite like this.
Nothing in the world was quite like this. Not here. Not that close to New Orleans. Or to most urban centers, for that matter.
This was pre-Buyer Barometer, and we were firmly in this is a WOW property; everyone thinks so.
We had drone video. Not just bird’s-eye footage, but footage outlining the property boundaries. More drone footage flying through those ancient live oaks at treetop level. AI horses! History! We had a powder keg of reasons to fall in love with this place.
And no one came to the launch.
I can’t quite explain how that feels to a Realtor who put in all that work and was so excited about the property. It’s a little like waking up sick on your eighth birthday. It’s a little like your prom date dumping you for your best friend when you already bought the dress.
It’s an oof, for sure.
So we tried the spaghetti model. We exhausted a lot of ideas.
And then we nailed it.
People didn’t know it was there.
Visibility was high on our promotions but low on the MLS. The people who wanted this type of place—and could afford it—didn’t know to look for it.
So we changed our promotion approach. We targeted the right audience and met them where they were: their screens.
And people started to fly in to see it.
Even one on a private jet.
The awareness in sheer numbers didn’t matter. Getting it in front of the right eyeballs on the right screens did.
Crawford taught us that having buyers in the funnel doesn’t tell you where they’re getting stuck. Liberty Oaks taught us that enormous visibility doesn’t necessarily mean you have meaningful awareness.
We learned both lessons the hard way, before there was a Buyer Barometer to tell us what we were looking at. And then we kept learning.
Eventually, we stopped treating those lessons as individual aha moments and built a system around them.
We invented. We tested. We evolved.
And now our clients get the benefit of everything we learned along the way.
So How Do You Get Your Hands On a Buyer Barometer?
Well, you list with us.
Or you work with us.
Our clients get regular updates throughout a listing, but every other week they also receive a Buyer Barometer report.
We look at the quantitative data available to us and combine it with the qualitative stuff: direct buyer feedback, conversations with other Realtors, open-house attendees, showing behavior, what buyers are choosing instead, what’s happening with competing homes and what patterns are starting to emerge.
We listen. We learn. And then we pivot.
Sometimes the answer is promotion. Sometimes it’s presentation. Sometimes it’s price. Sometimes we need more information before we touch anything at all. And sometimes we make one change, learn something new and run the Barometer again.
Because learning isn’t waiting. And pivoting isn’t doing something just so everyone feels like we did something.
The point is to figure out what deserves our time, our attention and, importantly, our client’s money.
All in service of Crawford’s question from the very beginning:
How do I become the first property sold when someone does buy, or at least the first three?
Our job isn’t to tell you that with the right price, the right prep, the right promotion and the right agent, your home is guaranteed to sell for top dollar.
That’s snake oil.
Our job is to increase your odds.
That means starting from a grounded, educated position using everything we can learn before we launch. And then, once we leave the theoretical and enter the actual market, continuing to listen, learn and pivot as buyers give us new information.
We can’t promise which house a buyer will choose. But we can pay very close attention to whether they’re noticing yours, whether they’re leaning in, whether they’re coming through the door, where they’re getting stuck and what they ultimately choose instead.
And then we can do something useful with what we learn.
Because the plan isn’t the point.
Getting you to the closing table with dignity is.
Want to know more? Let's talk.
And if all of this leaves you wondering what kind of person you should trust with that much judgment, responsibility and agency, that’s exactly where we’re headed next.
Who should you work with—and what should you look for?
That’s next week.
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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