Somewhere along the way, Seller’s Direction became almost institutionalized as the way to list a house.
List the property. Pick a day. Hold the offers. Wait for the bidding war.
Except the bidding war is not actually included in the paperwork.
A Seller’s Direction can be a very useful part of a listing strategy. It can establish when and how offers will be dealt with, create a clear decision point and, in the right circumstances, help concentrate buyer activity.
But it does not create demand. It does not make a property worth more. And it does not summon six buyers at 6:57 p.m. on Tuesday carrying unconditional offers and bags of money.
That part still requires an actual strategy.
There Isn’t One Right Way to Price a House
This is where I think the conversation gets unnecessarily rigid.
There are several perfectly legitimate ways to bring a property to market. They can all work. They just work for different reasons and under different conditions.
You can price low and concentrate demand
This is the version most people now associate with holding offers.
A house that might reasonably sell around $500,000 gets listed at $449,900. The launch is deliberate. The marketing happens quickly. Showings are compressed into a short window. Buyers know there is an offer date.
If enough genuine demand exists, several buyers may make decisions at roughly the same time. Competition can push the final price toward — and sometimes beyond — what the seller hoped to achieve.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that strategy.
But notice how many pieces were involved. The asking price was deliberate. The timing was deliberate. The marketing was deliberate. The offer process was deliberate. And most importantly, there actually had to be enough buyer demand to support the plan.
The Seller’s Direction was one ingredient.
It wasn’t the recipe.
You can price high and negotiate
That can work too.
A seller may decide they are willing to wait for the right buyer. They may start above what recent evidence suggests the property will ultimately sell for.
A buyer comes along and offers less. The seller counters. The buyer moves. The seller moves. Eventually they arrive somewhere in the middle — perhaps very close to where the seller expected to end up anyway.
People sometimes talk about this as though it is an antiquated way to sell a house.
It isn’t.
It’s negotiation. Humans have been doing it since somebody tried to trade two goats for a wheel.
The important part is that the strategy recognizes what it is. If you intentionally leave room for negotiation, you have to be prepared to negotiate.
You can also just price the damn house properly
This one gets surprisingly little attention.
Sometimes the best strategy is to look carefully at the evidence, understand the competition, understand the buyers likely to consider the property, and put a price on the house that makes sense.
Then somebody offers approximately what it is worth.
The seller realizes the offer is reasonable. The buyer realizes the asking price was reasonable. Everybody signs.
Nobody needs to pretend the last 36 hours were an episode of Succession.
There are plenty of circumstances where that is an excellent outcome.
The Problem Is When We Start Cross-Breeding the Strategies
This is where things get weird.
We take the ambitious asking price from one strategy.
Then we add the offer deadline from another.
Then we borrow the expectation of multiple offers from a third.
Then we remove the seller’s willingness to negotiate.
So now we have a house priced at the absolute upper end of the evidence, with offers held until Sunday, while expecting buyers to bid substantially over asking — despite there being no evidence that enough buyers are actually competing for it.
That is not a strategy.
That is a collection of things we liked about other strategies.
It’s the real-estate equivalent of saying: I like the butter from this recipe, the sugar from that recipe, the cooking temperature from a third one, and I don’t personally care for flour.
Then being disappointed when Michelin doesn’t call.
An Offer Deadline Can Concentrate Demand. It Cannot Manufacture It.
This is probably the most important distinction.
If eight qualified buyers genuinely want the same property, bringing them to the same decision point can absolutely affect the outcome.
If one qualified buyer genuinely wants the property, making them wait until Tuesday does not magically create seven friends for them.
A calendar entry is not competition.
The same principle applies to marketing generally. MLS® can expose a home to the market, but exposure by itself does not create demand. And good listing marketing starts with understanding who the likely buyer actually is, not simply shouting louder at everybody.
A Changing Market Exposes Bad Strategy Faster
This matters even more when market conditions start shifting.
August 2026 is a good example of why broad labels like hot, cold, up or down can be misleading.
According to the August 2026 monthly data from the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of REALTORS® and CREA, provincial MLS® home sales in August were down 7.1% from a year earlier, while residential sales in St. John’s were down 10.8%. At the same time, the St. John’s benchmark home price was up 7.5% year-over-year.
New listings across Newfoundland and Labrador increased 19.8%, yet active inventory still finished the month 17.2% below the previous August and remained well below historical norms. You can see the full CREA/NLAR release here.
Sales down. Prices up. New listings up. Available inventory down.
All at the same time.
That isn’t contradictory. That’s a market.
It is also why the question “Is the market cooling?” is rarely enough to build a listing strategy around. A market can be slower for one property, fiercely competitive for another, and completely indifferent to a third — in the same city and the same week.
That local context is exactly why national or even province-wide headlines can mislead St. John’s buyers and sellers.
The Market Does Not Owe Us the Strategy That Worked Last Year
This is where experience is supposed to matter.
The job is not to learn one clever way to sell houses and repeat it forever.
The job is to understand what market this particular property is actually standing in.
Who is likely to buy it? How many realistic alternatives do those buyers have? Where does this house sit against those alternatives? How much demand exists at this price? Is competition actually likely?
Is speed important? Is maximum exposure more valuable than price discovery? Would an offer deadline increase leverage — or simply inconvenience the only buyer who was ready to write?
Different properties can require completely different approaches in the same neighbourhood during the same week.
The market does not care what technique is fashionable.
Pick the Recipe
Seller’s Directions aren’t the problem.
Underpricing isn’t the problem.
Pricing aggressively isn’t the problem.
Negotiating isn’t the problem.
Even paying over asking isn’t automatically a problem, because asking price and market value are not the same thing.
The problem is using tactics without understanding the strategy they belong to.
There are multiple ways to successfully sell a house. Choose one that fits the property, the seller, the buyers and the market.
Then actually execute it.
Because you can absolutely combine ingredients from three different recipes.
Just don’t act surprised when what comes out of the oven looks like roadkill.
If you’re selling, the useful question isn’t simply “Are we holding offers?” It’s “What is the whole strategy — and what evidence says it fits this house?”