From 180 days on market to sold in 14 — a Bay Hill estate
Bay Hill · Seller Representation (re-list) · 2024
The Result
180 DOM → 14 DOM · 24 showings first weekend · 3 offers
Prior DOM
180
Relist DOM
14
First-weekend showings
24
Closed price
$2.025M
The Challenge
What we walked into.
The home had been listed with another agent for 180 days at $2.2M with a single tepid offer at $1.9M — which the seller had turned down and then watched the listing go silent for another 60 days. By the time we came in, every serious Bay Hill buyer had already seen the home on MLS, scrolled past the same 12 sub-par interior photos, and moved on. The listing had the Zillow equivalent of a bad Yelp review: zero saves, single-digit views per week, and a 'listed with reduction' stamp.
The seller was exhausted. They'd moved most of their furniture to their new Naples home already, left behind a weird mix of personal art, faded drapes, and the owner's office still set up. The house was showing dead.
Our Strategy
What we did differently.
- 01
Staging refresh — removed the owner's personal art, pulled 40% of the remaining furniture, rented neutral area rugs and a few accent pieces to fill the great room and primary suite.
- 02
Completely re-shot all photography with twilight exteriors, drone, and a proper wide-angle interior kit — the new hero photo was a dusk shot of the pool with the house glowing behind it.
- 03
Reset the price to $1.995M, which put the home under the psychological $2M barrier and into every search filter capped at 'under $2M' that buyers were using.
- 04
Pre-inspection and pre-survey ordered before relaunch so we could hand the report to buyers on request — eliminating the biggest late-stage friction point in Bay Hill sales.
- 05
Agent-only tour preview on a Thursday, then full public launch on a Friday evening with the new photos hitting Zillow and all syndicated sites within 90 minutes of each other.
Execution
How it went down.
The relaunch hit Friday at 6pm. By Sunday evening we had logged 24 showings, 3,400 Zillow saves, and the listing was the #2 most-viewed property in ZIP 32819 for the weekend. Three offers came in by Monday noon — $1.95M, $2.0M, and $2.05M. We countered the top two, and the $2.05M offer came back at $2.025M with a 30-day close and a waived appraisal gap up to $50K.
Results
What the seller / buyer actually took home.
Closed $2.025M in 14 days — $125K above the failed offer the seller had received at 180 DOM, and on a listing the market had written off as stale. The seller's total carrying cost for the extra 6 months on the prior listing was ~$42K in taxes, insurance, and utilities, so the net uplift from the relist strategy was roughly $167K versus accepting the $1.9M offer that had been on the table.
I'd already given up. Ryan told me we were going to close in under 30 days and I laughed. Fourteen days later, I was signing the closing docs from my new house in Naples.
Seller · Bay Hill · 2024
Ryan's Reflection
Ryan Solberg
Broker · MaxLife Realty · BK3354351
Your transaction
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