In January I posted about a house for sale in Boulder that I was slightly obsessed with. You can click through that link for the full story, but the short version is the sellers were asking for too much money for over a year. I had a bet with myself that the final sale price would be no more than $2.3 million. I can happily report that I was 100% correct: the house sold two days ago for $2,225,000, over a million dollars below the initial asking price.
As glad I am to be correct, I hope the developer/seller didn't lose money. I want new housing to be built in Boulder, and if developers lose money, that won't happen. At the same time, I don't want sellers (including private parties) being overly greedy, and I do have a little bit of schadenfreude when unreasonable sellers are shown that the housing market can have some logical sense.
There's very similar new build, unsold house in Boulder that was initially listed just after the one above. It hasn't sold likely because it has yet to fall below 70% of its initial asking price. It is also being sold by a developer. I probably won't post about it when it sells, but the fact that it hasn't sold yet, when the one above has, should tell the developer that they need to lower the price more (and be less greedy).
Sadly, there's always truly greedy (and/or delusional) developers, like this one. They have dropped the price less than $150,000 over a year and a half on an initial asking price of $4.7 million. By my math, they need to drop by at least ten times that before it will sell. I hope they enjoy paying property taxes, insurance, utilities, and the construction loan on an empty house for another 15 years!