How the Lisa Sevajian Group prices homes in Massachusetts and New Hampshire — and why choosing the right model from the start is the single decision that determines everything else.
The question comes within the first ten minutes of almost every listing appointment. The sellers are usually seated at the dining room table, the comps are in front of them, and before I have finished walking them through the preparation plan, one of them asks: so what do you think we should price it at?
It is a fair question. It is the question every seller wants answered. The honest answer is that pricing is not a number I arrive at before understanding the property, the condition, the timing, the competition, and most importantly, what outcome the seller is actually trying to produce. The number comes at the end of that conversation, not the beginning.
Over nearly twenty years and approaching 2,000 sales across Massachusetts and New Hampshire, I have seen what happens when pricing is treated as a formula rather than a strategy. The houses that sit for sixty days with repeated price reductions. The clean properties in great towns that sold for less than they should have because the launch was not designed to create competition. The sellers who took the first offer because they priced high and waited and eventually accepted whatever came. The biggest mistake in residential real estate is applying a single pricing framework to every situation. Good pricing is not about picking a number. It is about choosing a model that fits the home, the market, and the moment.
At the Lisa Sevajian Group, we use three distinct pricing models. Here is how each one works, when each one performs best, and how we decide which one belongs on your home.
Every home is different. Every seller has a different set of goals, a different timeline, and a different property competing in a different micro-market. The biggest mistake in residential real estate — the one that costs sellers the most money and the most stress — is applying a single pricing formula to every situation.
Some agents price everything slightly below the most recent comp and call it a day. Others anchor to what the seller hopes to net and work backward. Neither approach reflects how buyers actually behave. And neither produces the results that a deliberate, home-specific strategy can deliver.
At the Lisa Sevajian Group, we use three distinct pricing models. Each one has a specific purpose. Each one performs best under specific conditions. And each one requires a different preparation and marketing approach to work correctly. The work of figuring out which model fits your home begins well before the sign goes in the ground.
We have been in business since 2007. Approaching 2,000 sales across Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In that time, we have seen what happens when pricing is calibrated correctly — and what happens when it is not. This post walks through all three models, when each one works, and the decision framework we use to choose between them.
Energy pricing is the most misunderstood strategy in residential real estate. It sounds counterintuitive: set the list price slightly below what comparable homes have sold for, and trust that the resulting buyer competition will drive the final number above what a higher list price would have achieved. Done correctly, it works. Done incorrectly, it is simply leaving money on the table.
The mechanics are straightforward. When a home in a sought-after town in Essex County or Rockingham County is priced below the natural equilibrium of the market, it signals value to every buyer who is actively searching in that range. Multiple buyers register interest simultaneously. That creates the conditions for a structured offer deadline, which we use to compress the decision window and force competing bids to surface at the same time rather than sequentially.
Sequential offers are dangerous for sellers. The first offer comes in, you counter, you wait, you negotiate back and forth — and you never know if a better offer was 48 hours behind it. A structured, simultaneous offer review eliminates that uncertainty. Energy pricing is the mechanism that generates the buyer interest needed to make that structure work.
Energy pricing fails when the demand infrastructure is absent. If the home is in a softer market, in a price range with abundant competing inventory, or in a condition that limits the buyer pool, then pricing below comps simply means selling below comps. There is no magic in the number itself — the energy only comes from the buyer competition that the number is designed to generate.
It also fails when the marketing and preparation do not match the strategy. You cannot engineer buyer excitement around a home with poor photography, deferred maintenance visible on listing day, or a showing structure so fragmented that no single deadline ever forms. The pricing model and the marketing plan have to be built together.
The LSG selling protocol delivers an average of 6 days before our clients happily accept an offer. Energy pricing is one of the core tools in that protocol — when matched to the right home and market, it compresses the timeline without sacrificing price. See the full seller process.
Market-Based pricing is the workhorse model. It positions the home at current comparable sales — aligned with what buyers in that market have recently paid for similar homes in similar condition. No premium. No engineered discount. Just an accurate, defensible price that a qualified buyer can recognize and act on.
For many sellers, Market-Based pricing is the right answer not because it produces the highest price, but because it produces the most reliable outcome. A seller who needs to close within 60 days to purchase another property, a seller whose home has already had multiple showing days with modest traffic, or a seller whose property has a feature set that is well-represented in the current comp pool — all of these are candidates for the Market-Based model.
The key discipline with Market-Based pricing is accuracy. "Current comps" means recently closed comparable sales, weighted toward the most recent 60 to 90 days, adjusted for meaningful differences in size, condition, lot, and location. It does not mean the highest sold price in the neighborhood from the last 18 months. It does not mean what a neighbor got two years ago before rates changed. It means the real market, right now, for a home like yours.
Market-Based pricing is also the most appropriate recovery model if an Energy or Aspirational strategy has not performed as expected. When the first two weeks of showing activity do not produce offers, a market adjustment to a well-researched Market-Based number resets the conversation without requiring a dramatic correction.
Aspirational pricing is the most misused model in residential real estate — and when applied correctly, the one with the highest upside. It positions the home above current comparable sales when the home has genuine, demonstrable advantages that those comparables do not reflect.
The operative word is genuine. Not "the seller believes the home is worth more." Not "the seller needs a certain number to make the move work financially." Those are not pricing criteria — they are financial pressures, and pricing a home to solve a seller's financial problem rather than to reflect market reality is a strategy that consistently fails.
Aspirational pricing works when the premium is supported by evidence:
Aspirational pricing requires patience. The buyer pool is narrower — by definition, because you are asking more than most recent buyers have paid for comparable homes. That means the timeline extends. It means you may show the home to more buyers before finding the one who sees the full value. It means marketing has to work harder — professional staging, premium photography, and targeted outreach to the specific buyer who will pay a premium are all non-negotiable.
The discipline is knowing when to hold and when to adjust. If an Aspirational price generates strong showing traffic but no offers after two weeks, the market is typically communicating one of two things: either the premium is too large relative to what buyers can justify, or the marketing has not yet reached the right buyer. Both are fixable. Extended time on market without a response to either issue is not.
The right pricing model for a given home emerges from four questions. These are the questions we work through in every pre-listing consultation before we make a recommendation.
Demand is local and it changes. A home in Andover, MA competes in a different market than a home in Salem, NH — even in the same week. We look at recent days on market for comparable closed sales, the number of offers those sales attracted, and the list-to-sale price ratio in that specific price tier. High demand with low inventory favors Energy pricing. Moderate, stable demand favors Market-Based. A market where a select group of buyers is paying significant premiums for specific features may support Aspirational.
A home that needs work, has deferred maintenance, or faces financing restrictions because of its condition cannot support Energy pricing — the buyer pool is too narrow to generate the competition Energy requires. A home in excellent condition but with no meaningful differentiation from recent comps is a Market-Based candidate. A home with a genuinely superior renovation, lot, or feature set is an Aspirational candidate.
These two goals are not always in conflict — the LSG selling protocol is designed to pursue both simultaneously through preparation and timing. But when a seller has a hard close date, a simultaneous purchase at risk, or limited tolerance for uncertainty, Market-Based pricing provides the most reliable path. When the seller has flexibility and the home has differentiation, Energy or Aspirational may produce a meaningfully higher result.
Active competing listings matter. If three homes with similar square footage and condition are listed within one mile at prices below your Aspirational target, the pricing conversation changes. Buyers have optionality. Aspirational pricing works when your home is clearly superior to active competition — not just to recent closed sales. Market-Based pricing works even in competitive inventory environments because it removes the question of value and lets the home stand on its own merits.
The pricing recommendation we make to a seller is never a starting point for negotiation and it is never a guess. It is the output of a structured pre-listing process that we run on every home we list in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
We walk the home with the seller — not a quick 15-minute tour, but a thorough room-by-room assessment. We are looking at condition, deferred maintenance, updates that will return their investment in the sale price, and anything that a buyer or appraiser will flag. The goal is not to identify everything wrong with the home. The goal is to understand exactly what we are pricing and marketing — and to give the seller a candid, actionable picture of where preparation investment will pay off and where it will not.
The walkthrough question we ask on every listing: "What would a buyer say to justify a market adjustment if we don't address this?" If the answer is "nothing significant," we move on. If the answer involves paint, a failing seal on a window unit, worn carpet at the entry, or a front door that doesn't read the way the rest of the home does — those are $200 to $2,000 fixes that protect a much larger asset.
We run a comparative market analysis that goes well beyond pulling three recent sales and averaging the price. We look at closed sales in the past 60 to 90 days, active competition, and pending sales that have not yet closed. We adjust for meaningful differences — square footage, lot size, condition level, garage configuration, school district proximity, and any unique features. We look at list-to-sale ratios to understand whether the market is absorbing homes above, at, or below asking.
We also look at what did not sell. Expired listings and withdrawn listings are some of the most useful data points in any market analysis — they tell you exactly where buyer resistance has been, and they mark the ceiling that Aspirational pricing needs to stay below or have a compelling argument to justify exceeding.
Before pricing, we identify any condition factors that could affect appraisals, limit the financing options available to buyers, or hand buyers an edge after inspection. Homes that have deferred maintenance — a roof nearing end of life, older HVAC systems, visible water staining, settlement cracks in foundation areas — create two problems: they limit the pricing model available to us, and they give a buyer's inspector a basis to request concessions after an offer is accepted.
Addressing known issues before listing is almost always the better financial decision, particularly for sellers using Energy pricing where the goal is a clean, no-contingency offer at or above asking. A buyer who has paid above asking and then discovers in the inspection that the furnace is 22 years old is going to be a difficult conversation. A buyer who made their offer knowing about the furnace because we disclosed it upfront and reflected it in the condition assessment is not a problem — that is a managed transaction.
The Lisa Sevajian Group uses three pricing models: Energy pricing (set slightly below comparable sales to generate multiple competing offers), Market-Based pricing (set at current comparable sales to attract qualified buyers within a predictable timeline), and Aspirational pricing (set above comparables for a home with clear, demonstrable advantages that justify the premium). The right model depends on the home, the market, and the seller's goals.
Energy pricing means setting the list price slightly below recent comparable sales to ignite buyer competition. The goal is not to underprice the home permanently — it is to trigger multiple simultaneous offers that drive the final sale price above asking. This model works best when buyer demand in the area is high, inventory is low, and the home is in strong, show-ready condition.
Market-Based pricing is the right choice when the seller wants a clean, predictable transaction on a defined timeline. It positions the home at current comparable sales — neither aggressive nor aspirational — and attracts qualified buyers without requiring a bidding war to achieve fair value. It is the most reliable model for sellers who need certainty over maximum price.
Aspirational pricing positions a home above current comparable sales when the home has genuine, demonstrable advantages that the comps do not reflect — such as a major renovation, a premium lot, a unique view, or a feature that is highly sought in that specific market. It requires patience, strong marketing, and a buyer who sees the full value. It fails when the premium is not supported by tangible differences.
Not when Energy pricing is executed correctly. A well-engineered low list price — when supported by proper marketing, a clean showing window, and a structured offer deadline — creates competitive bidding that often delivers final prices well above the list. The danger is pricing low without the demand infrastructure to generate multiple offers. That is where sellers lose value.
If an Aspirational price generates showings but no offers after the first two weeks, the data is telling you something. LSG will review showing feedback, compare competing active listings, and recommend a market adjustment to align with buyer perception. Moving quickly on that adjustment preserves momentum. Waiting erodes it.
Before recommending any pricing model, LSG conducts a detailed walkthrough of the home to assess condition and identify high-return preparation steps. We then run a comparative market analysis — reviewing recent closed sales, pending sales, and active competition in the specific town and neighborhood. Condition, location, buyer demand levels, and timing all factor into which model we recommend.
The LSG selling protocol is a structured pre-launch and launch process that consistently delivers an average of 6 days before our clients happily accept an offer. It combines pre-market preparation, strategic pricing calibrated to the right model, targeted buyer outreach, and a deliberate showings and offer-review structure designed to compress the timeline without sacrificing price.
The right pricing model depends on your home, your market, and your goals. Let's find it together — no obligation, no pressure.