Questions sellers ask My house didn’t sell. Should I use the same agent again in Palo Alto?

The question underneath the question

Most owners ask this as a question about a person, and it is very hard to answer in that form. You have worked with them for months. They may have been right about almost everything. Deciding whether they were good is a judgment nobody can make from outside your house, and it is beside the point anyway.

Here is the version that can be answered, and it is Maggie’s:

You can’t get a different result doing the same thing.

So: name the things that are going to be different. The asking price, the preparation, the photography, the staging, the materials, the launch date, the way the objection gets answered. If you can list four of them and see who is going to do each one, you have a plan, and the name at the top matters less than the list. If the honest answer is we’ll lower the price and try again in the spring, the record suggests the spring will look a lot like the autumn.

What the record shows about changing

Of the 338 Palo Alto homes that came off the market unsold and later sold, 101 came back through a different brokerage. That is 30%, and it climbs steeply with time off the market.

And the outcomes differed:

Source: Maggie’s analysis of MLSListings records — Palo Alto single-family listings that came off the market cancelled, expired or withdrawn between January 2020 and September 2026, matched against recorded sales through 25 September 2026.

What that table can and cannot tell you, stated plainly, because the difference matters. It cannot say a change of brokerage caused the better result. Plenty of houses in the same-brokerage column came back with a new price, new work and new photography, and they are counted as “same” all the same — so what is really being measured is a rough proxy for how much changed, and the proxy is imperfect. The reliable reading is the narrower one: houses where something visibly changed did better than houses where the listing simply went back out.

What a real change of plan looks like

Whoever runs it, the second attempt is a different piece of work from the first:

• A price built from what the house is now, after the work, rather than defended down from the old number.
• Preparation in the order that matters. On most Palo Alto houses the approach and the exterior come before anything inside, because that is where the buyer’s opinion forms.
• Photography shot after the work is finished, and materials rewritten around the house as it stands.
• The objection answered out loud — the road, the train, the floor plan, the original kitchen — in the listing, before a buyer has to go looking.
• A launch date chosen rather than arrived at.

The houses Maggie is handed

Maggie is the agent Palo Alto owners call when the house has already been on the market once. Three of her own closings were exactly that:

• 1690 Edgewood Drive — listed and cancelled more than once over roughly four years. She was the sixth agent. It went into contract in eight days and closed at $5,110,000, $112,000 above asking. A neighbor had written in to say the asking price was too high; the letter is on the page.
• 154 Coleridge Avenue — listed twice before, one listing cancelled and one expired. She was the third agent. It closed at $7,940,000.
• 2200 Saint Francis Drive — the listing before hers expired. She was the second agent. It closed at $5,110,000, $122,000 above asking, thirteen days on the market.

Three houses is three houses, and no rate is being claimed from them. What they show is a way of working that starts with the reason a buyer hesitated and builds the whole sale around answering it.

What to do this week

Write down the four things that will be different. Then ask whoever is going to run the second attempt — the same agent or another one — to tell you how each of the four gets done, and what it costs. The conversation answers the question faster than any amount of deciding about people does.

If it would help to have that list drawn up for your house by someone who has taken on houses that had already been listed, that is a conversation and there is no charge for it.