Questions sellers ask My house didn’t sell the first time — when should I try again?

The record, by how long the house stayed away

Every one of these homes is a Palo Alto single-family house that came off the market unsold and later sold on the MLS. They are grouped by the gap between coming off and going back on.

For comparison: 2,219 Palo Alto homes sold in the same period with no failed listing on record, at a median 103.9% of their original asking price in a median 8 days.

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analysis of MLSListings records — Palo Alto single-family listings that came off the market cancelled, expired or withdrawn between January 2020 and September 2026, matched against recorded sales through 25 September 2026.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

Read it carefully, because the honest reading is more useful than the obvious one.

The record cannot say that waiting causes a better result. What it can say is that the houses which went straight back out — inside a month — took three times as long to find a buyer as the ones that waited, and gave up nearly four points against their own asking price doing it. A month is not enough time to re-prepare a house, re-shoot it and re-plan a launch. So the fast relist is mostly a house that went back out the same, and the market treated it the same.

The gap is where the treatment fits. What goes into it is what does the work.

How long the work actually takes

Set the date from the work rather than from the calendar:

• Feedback and diagnosis — one to two weeks. The agents who showed it, the questions that kept coming back, what buyers said when nobody was selling to them.
• The work that was skipped — two to eight weeks, depending on what it is. How long preparation takes has the ranges.
• Photography and materials, after the work — one to two weeks. Re-shooting before the work is finished wastes the shoot.
• The launch date itself — chosen, rather than whenever everything happens to be ready.

That adds to somewhere between four and twelve weeks for most houses, which is also where the record’s best results sit.

The season is worth a few weeks

Palo Alto listings come off the market unevenly across the year. Of 787 failed listings, 22.4% came off in November and December, and December alone accounts for 12.2% — the single heaviest month.

That matters for two reasons. A house that comes off in December is coming off into the quietest weeks of the year, so the pressure to relaunch immediately is the least useful instinct available. And the weeks either side of the new year are the natural preparation window for a spring launch, which is where the buyers are. When to sell in Palo Alto has five years of seasons behind it.

Two in three houses do sell

Of the 520 Palo Alto homes whose listing came off unsold between January 2020 and September 2026, 338 had sold again on the MLS by 25 September 2026. Counting only the homes that had enough time to get there: 23.7% sold within 90 days of coming off (506 homes), 44.2% within six months (477), 55.0% within a year (449) and 66.6% within two years (371).

Those counts shrink on purpose. A house that came off the market last year cannot yet be counted for or against the two-year figure, so it is left out of that row rather than counted as a failure — which is why the two-year share is the highest and rests on the fewest homes.

Read “came off unsold” broadly. 584 of the 787 listings behind those homes were cancelled rather than expired, and a cancellation is sometimes a decision rather than a defeat — the listing is pulled and returns under a new MLS number, with the days-on-market counter back at zero. Every one of the 338 relists that sold carried a new number. So what this measures is houses that did not sell the first time, whatever the label on the way out, and the share of them that sold later.

A listing that did not work is a setback with a known shape, and most of the houses in that record came out the other side. It is a description of what happened to those houses, not a prediction about any one of them.

One of them

154 Coleridge Avenue had been listed twice before Maggie took it — one of those listings was cancelled and one expired. She was the third agent. It closed in March 2025 at $7,940,000.

Set the date backwards

Decide what has to be different, work out how long that takes, and put the launch at the end of it. A date chosen any other way is a hope rather than a plan, and the record is fairly unkind to hope.