Priced too high is usually the lazy answer.

Most houses that sit were never presented properly. Dark rooms, a wide lens bending the walls, no floor plan, a lead image shot at the wrong hour. Buyers scroll past in under two seconds, and no price reduction ever wins back a first impression that was never made. This is also the cheapest thing on the list to fix.

Traffic in the first ten days is the cleanest signal you will ever get. Plenty of visits and no offers means the house is not delivering what the photographs promised. Almost no visits at all means the listing is not reaching anybody, which is a marketing problem rather than a price one.

A house described as three bedrooms and two baths reaches people shopping by filter. A house described as what it actually is, with its architect, its block and the thing that makes it worth crossing town to see, reaches the person who was always going to pay the most for it. Wrong description, wrong buyer.

The objection nobody says out loud. The layout, the street, the neighbor, the stairs, a smell. Agents hear it and rarely pass it along. I ask directly, and when four people say the same thing inside two weeks, that is your answer. It is usually either fixable or disclosable, and both beat guessing.

When the photographs are right, the story is right, the traffic is steady, and the feedback keeps coming back as a lovely house for less money, the price is the problem. One meaningful reduction beats three small ones. Small cuts only teach the market to wait for the next.

You price where the comparable sales say the house belongs. It suits most houses in most conditions, it reaches the buyers actually shopping in that band, and it leaves room to negotiate without giving anything away. The risk is that it is only ever as good as the comparables, and in New Orleans they are often thin.

You price under the band deliberately, to create competition. In a neighborhood with real depth of buyers and few alternatives it works: several offers arrive and the market sets the price above where you started. In a thin market or a slow month it does not start a bidding war. It simply sells your house for less.

Occasionally a house genuinely has no comparable: a documented architect, a rare plan, a corner that never trades. Then the number has to be argued rather than derived, and you need the one buyer willing to hear the argument. That costs you days on market while they surface, so you do it with your eyes open.