How Much Does Each Week on the Market Cost a Columbus Seller?

The price holds for 14 days. After that it costs you about 1 percent a week, and by week 9 the median central Ohio seller has given back 5 percent of the number they launched with.

That is the answer, and it comes from 20,891 closings recorded in the Columbus REALTORS MLS in 2026 through September 3. I pull every closing in this market and read the original list price against the sale price, and the pattern is clean enough to put a dollar figure on. Fifty-four percent of sellers closed below what they first asked, at a median shortfall of $15,000. The other 46 percent closed at or above it, and the thing that separated the two groups was not the house. It was how long the house sat before somebody wrote on it.

How much does each week on the market cost?

Here is the curve, measured from the day a listing entered the MLS to the day it went under contract, with the median sale price as a percentage of the original list price for each window.

Weeks to contract	Closings	Sale price vs original list	Median shortfall
Week 1	6,906	100.0%	$0
Week 2	2,316	100.0%	$0
Week 3	1,605	98.7%	$4,900
Week 4	1,343	98.6%	$5,000
Weeks 5 to 6	2,237	98.0%	$6,900
Weeks 7 to 8	1,453	96.6%	$10,600
Weeks 9 to 13	2,114	94.8%	$17,500
Weeks 14 to 26	2,067	92.8%	$25,000
Past 26 weeks	843	90.1%	$35,000

Read the second column first. Nine thousand two hundred and twenty-two homes, 44 percent of everything that closed this year, went under contract inside fourteen days. Every one of those windows closed at a median of exactly the original asking price. Not above it. Not below it. The number the seller launched with was the number the buyer paid.

Then read down. Week three is the first crack, and it is small: 98.7 percent, a $4,900 median concession. By weeks seven and eight the median seller is giving back $10,600. By weeks nine through thirteen it is $17,500. Past six months it is $35,000, and the buyers who are still looking at a listing that old are not asking whether the house is worth it. They are asking what is wrong with it.

Why does the price fall instead of the house?

Because a listing is a one-time asset, and the first two weeks are when it spends almost all of its value.

Every buyer with a saved search in central Ohio gets the same alert at the same minute a home goes live. That is the entire pool of active, motivated, pre-approved demand for that house, and it all looks in the same 48 hours. If the price makes sense, several of those buyers move at once, and the competition among them is what holds the sale at asking. If the price does not make sense, the same buyers look, decide, and move on to the next alert. They do not come back to check.

After that window the audience changes. The people finding a listing in week six are new to the search, fewer in number, and looking at a house with 40 days on it. Days on market is public. Every one of them reads it as a discount that has not been announced yet, and the curve above is what happens when enough of them act on that read.

In my experience the sellers who end up in the bottom half of that table are rarely the ones with a problem house. They are the ones who priced to the number they hoped for, planned to come down if they had to, and did not realize that the coming down would happen after the buyers had already left.

How much does overpricing cost at each price point?

The percentage is fairly consistent across the market. The dollars are not.

Original list price	Closings	Sold below original list	Median shortfall when below	Days to contract, held price	Days to contract, missed price
Under $300,000	8,192	53%	$11,000	7	39
$300,000 to $450,000	6,456	51%	$14,900	6	43
$450,000 to $650,000	3,789	56%	$22,015	5	47
Over $650,000	2,454	56%	$45,000	4	48.5

Two things in that table matter more than the rest.

First, the last two columns. At every tier, the homes that held their price went under contract in about a week, and the homes that missed took six to seven. That gap does not narrow as the price goes up. It widens slightly. A $700,000 house that launches right sells in four days. A $700,000 house that launches wrong sits for seven weeks and then gives up $45,000.

Second, the share. Above $450,000, 56 percent of sellers closed below their original number. That is the tier where the comps are thinnest, where the seller's own sense of the house carries the most weight in the pricing conversation, and where the cost of being wrong is the highest. It is also the tier where I see the most listings priced off what a neighbor asked rather than what a neighbor got.

Which Columbus suburbs miss the launch price most often?

Same data, cut by city, for every city with at least 30 closings recorded in 2026.

City	Closings	Sold below original list	Median shortfall	Median days to contract
Upper Arlington	106	31%	$40,000	6
Worthington	115	38%	$22,500	10
Gahanna	54	39%	$26,900	19.5
Westerville	935	45%	$15,000	14
Hilliard	631	45%	$14,900	13
Pickerington	465	47%	$14,900	16
Dublin	734	49%	$19,435	14
Grove City	765	50%	$14,900	14
Columbus	5,661	52%	$14,900	18
Lewis Center	295	53%	$17,255	20
New Albany	303	54%	$20,000	23
Delaware	676	57%	$19,900	23
Powell	545	60%	$20,000	21
Galena	163	63%	$24,900	29
Sunbury	173	64%	$19,949	30

Upper Arlington is the outlier on both ends. Only 31 percent of sellers there missed their launch price, the lowest in the table, and the ones who did gave back a median of $40,000, the highest. Established inventory, deep comps, and buyers who know the streets: when the price is right it moves in six days, and when it is wrong there is no hiding it.

Powell, Galena and Sunbury sit at the other end at 60 to 64 percent, and they share a cause. All three carry a heavy share of newer construction and larger lots, where the comps are spread thinner and a seller's expectations are more often anchored to what the house cost to build than to what the next one down the street just closed at. Delaware and New Albany run the same pattern a step behind.

Westerville, where I do most of my listing work, sits in the middle at 45 percent with a $15,000 median miss and a 14-day median to contract. That is a market that rewards a correct launch fast and punishes a wrong one at a predictable rate, which is the best kind of market to price in, because the data tells you exactly what the number is.

What should you do before you list?

Treat the launch price as the one decision you cannot take back.

Price to the closed comps from the last 60 days, not to the active listings around you. Active listings are other sellers' hopes. Closed sales are what buyers actually paid, and the buyers reading your listing are looking at the same closed sales you should be.

Decide the number before the photos are taken, not after the first weekend. The pattern in the first table is not about reductions. It is about who is still watching when the reduction happens. A $10,000 cut in week seven reaches a fraction of the audience that saw the original price in week one.

If you are going to test a higher number, know what the test costs. In this market the test runs about a point a week, and by the time it is finished the buyers who would have paid full price have bought something else.

One more thing, and I mean it exactly as written. If your home is already listed with another agent, I would never step on that agreement. It is yours to honor. But when that listing expires, or your relationship with your agent reaches its natural end, come sit down with me. We will read what went wrong against the numbers above and relaunch it right. New agent, new photos, new marketing, and the days on market reset to zero. Your home deserves a real first impression, and it can only get one more.

If you have not listed yet, that first impression is still ahead of you. Before you sign with anybody, send me your address or get a home value estimate and I will tell you what your house should launch at, backed by the closed comps on your street, along with what each week past that number is likely to cost. The related reading on why a house stops selling and what a great listing agent actually does covers the rest of the launch.

Thinking about selling in Westerville or anywhere in central Ohio? Let's talk. Contact Adam Geuy at Blacktree Realty.

Adam Geuy, Realtor, Blacktree Realty. ABR, PSA, SRS. Central Ohio. 937.239.2919.