A relisted property can carry several negative connotations, i.e., that it’s the second try of a listing that failed the first time, or that the seller is trying to game the days on market by canceling then relisting.
But is this stereotype one that survives contact with reality?
A 2025 study published in the Journal of Housing Economics aims to answer this question, looking at the impacts and actual uses of relisting by sellers. The study draws on a “comprehensive dataset” from the Massachusetts-based MLS Property Information Network (MLS PIN).
It uses a sample size of 670,000 housing transactions in Massachusetts from 2000 to 2019 to find how a relisting affects sales price, as well as time on market for single-family homes. (The study only focuses on listings that eventually sold, not withdrawn listings that were never relisted for a later sale.) Of this sample size, 45,000 homes (6.7% of them) were relisted.
RISMedia spoke with a co-author of the study, University of Georgia real estate professor Darren Hayunga, for further insights. The most essential takeaway for real estate professionals, Hayunga says, is that “agents overall should not view relistings as entirely bad, but in order to maximize the price or minimize the time on market, they should get their list price set correctly.”
Asked why he and his co-author chose to look into this topic, Hayunga says that “many of our data sets do not track relistings. And so there is a dearth of rigorous academic study of this topic, but the topic is relevant from a number(s) standpoint.”
Relistings by the numbers
Ultimately, there is no single way to determine how a relisting universally affects a home sale, given the numerous factors from seller behavior to timing which shape a property sale and which the study accounts for.
The study groups together different periods of time between canceling a listing and then relisting, from seven days to 30 days to 90 days to 180 days. Anything beyond that was considered to be a new listing, Hayunga tells RISMedia.
“Ninety days is kind of key because our data set is the entire state of Massachusetts. Their MLS system considers anything past 90 days not necessarily to be the same listing,” Hayunga explained. How long a gap is needed for a relisting to be considered a new listing, without the cumulative days on market displayed, varies across different MLSs across the country.
The study found that following a relisting, a property tends to have lower days on the market. However, this does not take cumulative days on market into account; when this is accounted for, there is a 42-day median for single listing sales, compared to a 155-day median for relisted property sales.
“A seller can learn from the market that renovations are required, that their agent isn’t the best (or) that this isn’t the best market to sell in (for) their type of house. And so then they can relist,” says Hayunga, explaining how relistings can benefit the seller. Hayunga also explains that relisted properties that saw a longer gap (90-180 days) tend to sell quicker (cumulatively) than properties that saw shorter reductions such as 30 days.
“Ninety days and 180 days again allows for renovation or maybe even a different market, an overall market,” Hayunga adds.
However, the paper notes that “buyers generally lack visibility into seller motivation.” So, they might read a cancellation as a sign of lowered resolve, which can lead to lower offers or a prolonged marketing period for the seller. An expiration, meanwhile, may read as a seller holding firm to their listing price rather than lowering it for the sake of making a sale.
Due to the different factors that affect a relisting and ultimate outcome, the study delineates canceled or expired and the wider variable of where the housing market as a whole was. (The report classified 2000-2005 and 2012-2019 as expansion periods, 2006-2009 as contraction and 2009-2012 as the trough, or lowest, periods and calculated effects of relistings differing across these time periods.)
The study found that outcomes for these relistings were most dependent on “housing cycle timing and off-market gap.” While most periods saw some sort of overall price discount, those varied significantly depending on market conditions and timing, and for the peak of the early 2000s housing boom (May 2005-March 2006), relisted homes sold for premium—up to 13.7% more.
Hayunga says, that for instance, when the housing market is in a trough, a price reduction is a likely result when relisting. Even when a housing market is hot and in “rapid expansion,” a relisting might come with a price reduction.
“Properties are fairly hot, and we had to do a relisting,” says Hayunga, explaining why buyers would interpret a relisting during a rapid expansion period as “kind of a negative signal.”
Conversely, “if we’re at the peak market in housing, a relisting is not a failed listing at all. It actually is kind of a positive signal,” Hayunga says, arguing that a relisting during this period can be considered as “another bite at the apple.”
Hayunga and his co-author went so far as to develop an equation to find an expected value from a seller’s position given the current offer, and whether the seller intends to accept the offer, reject it and continue searching or cancel the listing.
“The inclusion of cancellation clarifies that this path is not necessarily indicative of failure, but rather of a strategic realignment that may improve expected outcomes,” the paper states. This underlines a specific seller decision relevant to relistings: how the initial listing is terminated.
Shawna Ader, a Seattle-based broker with Windermere who read the study, took a somewhat skeptical view of its conclusions and approach of “trying to apply science” to the human decision-making process of relistings.
“There are so many components and aspects that you cannot control for in a cancel-relist or a relist situation that you never know the why,” says Ader. “So trying to predict outcomes or understand outcomes based on established scientific values and sound principles of research … at the end of the day, you’re really trying to understand how collectively a bunch of granular, personal decisions have come about. And that, to me, is really—even with a great sample size which it sounds like they had—it’s a really difficult thing to understand.”
Ground-level view
Kofi Nartey, who works in the Beverly Hills luxury market as founder of GLOBL | RISE GLOBL Luxury and executive director of its real luxury division, offered anecdotal success stories of relisting. One in particular stood out: selling a house belonging to former NFL Hall of Famer LaDainian Tomlinson.
“His house had been on the market over a year at $3.5 million. And I was able to sell it within 10 days of relisting it at the same price just by repositioning the marketing, the photos, the videos and the specific outreach that we put into play,” recounts Nartey. “I can’t beat a property that’s been on the market for over a year and then I sold it in 10 days at the same price. That’s my best story.”
Per Nartey, overpricing tends to be a common theme of failed listing strategies: “A lot of agents unfortunately will accept listings or say yes to prices that they know the property won’t sell at. This is a true disservice to the property because then it does acquire or accumulate days on market and can become sort of stale. People will wonder why no one wants this property, but it’s basically overpriced. And if the property’s overpriced, your marketing is impacted. It’s less effective because you are marketing something that isn’t priced correctly.”
Sandra Rathe, a broker associate with Real and owner of the Sandra Rathe Team in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, tells RISMedia that, often, the perception of a relisting as a failed listing can bear out among buyers, “especially if there’s no price reduction that goes with it.”
“So if it expires and then we have to relist it, absolutely buyers are looking at that like there’s either something wrong with the house or that the seller is being very stubborn on pricing,” she says. “And so a lot of buyers definitely will overlook it at times because they feel like there’s going to be something wrong with it or the seller’s just not going to work with them.”
Rathe adds that sellers sometimes interpret a price reduction as a signal they’re “desperate” for the home to sell, but notes it can also show buyers that they’re flexible.
“As we’ve come out of the pandemic and prices have gone up really high, I think across the nation, we’ve experienced more challenges with sellers not wanting to do price reductions, feeling like their property is worth more than it potentially is. A lot of sellers are kind of living still thinking that the market is what it was during the pandemic, and it’s not,” says Rathe.
Nartey also adds that the luxury space tends to see more relistings than in “the more modestly priced home market,” as buyers seeking in that space can afford to be picky.
Asked about her experience with relistings, Ader says “price or condition” are the two “levers” typically pulled when a listed house fails to make an impression. “You can pull one of those levers and it’s really hard to go back retroactively and pull the condition lever because you’ve set a precedent for the house.”
Policy and precedent
Seattle’s Northwest MLS (NWMLS) requires 60 days off market before days on market reset on its portal display. Ader pointed to this as something which can give a property a fresh start without worries of “precedent” set.
“Because real estate is cyclical, (when you relist), you may have buyers who have entered the market that didn’t see that property (when it was listed the first time),” says Ader. Rathe also says that the days on market resetting does actively factor into when sellers choose to relist.
“Sometimes it’s really more about the seller’s head too much and they want to break, but they blame it on the way it’s going to appear in the MLS or with buyers looking at it online,” said Rathe. “So it absolutely will be a part of their decision-making of what they’re going to do and if they’re going to list right away.”
One of the central issues of the ongoing “private listing” debate roiling the industry is stats like days on market or price drops, which certain marketing strategies—primarily using off-MLS platforms—can erase or obscure. Brokerages and portals tout the ability to avoid these “negative insights” and “test prices” as a big draw for their private networks or pre-market programs.
Hayunga himself conducted a study on pocket listings that found some positive correlation between price and off-MLS sales.
Tying into her comments on the relisting study’s academic approach to tracking home transactions, Ader said a 60-day relisting gap can’t always stave off a price drop on the listing.
“I think it would fly in the face of reason to say that days on market isn’t relative to ultimate sale price. Can I see academically that a rest of a period of 60 days or more would decrease that ultimate price drop? Yes. But does it work every time? No,” Ader said.
Ader points to the increasing perfectionism in staging a property that’s not only expected, but required, as something that will nag at agents and sellers unless they take the effort to get it right the first time.
“Thirty years ago to list a house, we had five to 10 pictures on the internet. They were terrible. They were on a DOS-based screen. The photos used to be taken by the MLS photographer that would drive by with his window open and shoot the house. And obviously the advent of the internet changed all of that,” says Ader. “So over the course of that 30 years, we went from not staging at all and not necessarily preparing a house … and now it’s like you’re a general contractor to prepare a house to go on the market.”
“You’re doing all of those things, and if you don’t do that as an agent and you list a house for a price, your client and you are going to ask yourselves, ‘What if we had done this differently?’” Ader continues. “I don’t want to come back after we’ve put a house on the market and say, ‘What if we had changed the carpet? What if we had painted those walls? What if we had staged instead of taking your stuff out?’”
Circling back to the pricing, both Ader and Rathe say they agree with Hayunga that setting price correctly at first is key to minimizing days on market.
“I think that it is incredibly important to get the price right in the beginning because that’s when you have the most eyes on the property and that’s when you have the most momentum for the property,” said Rathe. “Sometimes you price yourself out of the market by giving yourself too much room to negotiate.”
