Listing Price Bracket Calculator

Buyers search in round brackets. A property priced at 412,000 is invisible to everyone whose filter stops at 400,000, and the seller never learns why the viewings dried up. The cost of sitting just above a threshold is far larger than the few thousand involved.

This checks how far above the nearest common threshold a price sits and what reducing to it would cost, so the decision is made on evidence rather than on reluctance to round down.

The calculation

Round the asking price down to the nearest search step to find the threshold beneath it. The difference is what dropping to that threshold costs, and dividing it by the monthly holding cost gives the number of months of waiting the reduction is worth.

Worked example

An asking price of 412,000 in a market where buyers search in 25,000 steps sits 12,000 above the 400,000 threshold — 3% above it. If holding the property costs 1,800 a month, dropping to 400,000 costs the equivalent of 6.7 months of holding, and it puts the property in front of every buyer whose maximum is 400,000.

Just under beats just over

Pricing at 399,950 appears in both the up-to-400,000 and the over-400,000 searches in most portals, while 412,000 appears only in the second. The asymmetry is the whole argument for rounding down rather than up.

Frequently asked questions