What boulder grading taught me about pricing a flat

There is a V4 at my gym that took me six weeks. Not six weeks of climbing it badly — six weeks of not getting past the second move, then arriving on a Tuesday in April and doing the whole thing first try, with no idea what had changed.

I have thought about that Tuesday more than is reasonable, mostly because I watch the same thing happen to sellers about four times a year.

A grade is a consensus, not a measurement

People new to bouldering assume the grade is a fact about the wall. It is not. A setter proposes it, and then about a hundred people try the problem over a month, and the number quietly moves to wherever most of them land. A V5 that everybody flashes becomes a V4 by the end of the fortnight, and nobody rechalks the tape — it just changes.

An asking price works the same way and almost nobody treats it that way. The price is not a property of the flat. It is a proposal, and the market spends four to six weeks voting on it, and the number ends up wherever the votes land regardless of what the tape said at the start.

The difference is that a gym adjusts in a fortnight and a seller can hold a wrong grade for six months.

What forcing looks like

On a wall, forcing is obvious from across the room, and the same four tells show up on a listing:

• The same attempt, repeated harder. Sixty relists of the same photographs at the same number is the property equivalent of throwing at the same hold twelve times. Nothing has changed except how tired you are.
• Going harder rather than differently. More viewings, more open houses, more marketing spend, all pushing on the one variable that was never the problem.
• Blaming the hold. The hold is not greasy. The buyers are not being unreasonable, and the last three transactions in the block are not a conspiracy.
• Waiting for a different kind of person. In the gym it is “I need to be taller”. On a listing it is “we just need the right buyer”, which is true in the same way and about as useful.

“The wall does not know you are trying hard. Neither does the market.”

One flat, real numbers

Last year I took over a listing that had been with somebody else for three months. Three-bedroom, good block, genuinely nice. The last three units in that block had closed between $1.32 and $1.38 million. It was on at $1.49.

Sixty-two days, nine viewings, no offers. Then a cut to $1.44 — nothing. Then $1.39, and it went in eleven days at $1.355 million.

Look at where that landed. It sold inside the range those three transactions had already marked out, which is where week two would have taken it, and it took five months and two public price cuts to get there. The cuts are the expensive part: a flat that has been listed since March and reduced twice is a flat every buyer’s agent describes as a flat that has been listed since March and reduced twice. You do not just lose the time. You lose the negotiating position too.

When the grade genuinely is wrong

I should be fair to the sellers here, because sometimes the consensus really is off and holding out really is right. A setter does occasionally under-grade a problem, and the number goes up rather than down after a hundred people have failed on it.

The property version is a unit the comparables do not describe. A freehold stack in a block where everything else is leasehold. The one corner layout on the floor plate, with a window in the second bedroom that none of the others have. A top-floor unit in an estate where the last three sales were all on the fourth. In those cases the last three transactions are not a range you sit inside — they are a range you have a specific, statable reason to sit above.

The test is whether you can say the reason in one sentence to somebody who is not you. “It is worth more because we renovated it” usually fails that test, because the buyer is pricing a kitchen they did not choose. “It is worth more because it is the only unit in the block on a freehold title” passes, and a valuer will say the same thing without being prompted.

If the reason survives being said out loud, hold. If it does not, you are not under-graded — you are just strong-willed, and the wall does not grade for that.

What actually works, in both

On the wall, what changed in April was not strength. It was that I stopped trying to reach the hold and started moving my feet first, which somebody had told me in February and I had ignored because it did not feel like effort.

For a listing it is the same shape. Price inside the range the last three transactions have already established, so the first fortnight of attention lands on a number that can actually be said yes to. Fix the thing that is genuinely fixable — the photographs, the clutter, the hour of day the pictures were taken — because those are your feet. And read the first two weeks as data rather than as an insult, because that is the whole of the vote and everything after it is a recount.

None of that is going easy. Pricing inside the range is not giving up on the number; it is the thing that gets you a real one. Six weeks of throwing myself at a hold did not make me stronger. It made me tired, and then somebody moved my foot four inches.

— MG

UnapprovedMichele did not write this post. It was written to the card copy that already existed, to give the template something real to render, and the date on it is invented too. Read it as a shape to correct.