Crickets. A Well-Priced Property and Nobody Calling.
The Lakes Region market in summer 2025 did not crash. It went quiet in a way that caught sellers and agents off guard, including me. What followed was one of the clearest illustrations of buyer hesitation I have experienced in this market.
I had spent the spring watching pricing patterns across the region the way I do every year. By the time I was ready to launch a Tuftonboro listing, a three-bedroom two-bath home in solid condition, the evidence felt clear. The mid-$500s was the right range. I priced in at $550,000 to $575,000 and waited. Crickets. No calls. A property with no deferred maintenance, updated kitchen, clean yard in a good neighborhood, and nothing moving. That is when I understood that something had shifted.
Buyer hesitation is different from pricing error
What I observed in July 2025 was not buyers deciding the property was overpriced. It was buyers deciding not to decide yet. The hesitation was broader than any single property or price point. National conversation about interest rates, economic uncertainty, and general caution about large purchases was creating a pause that showed up in showing requests and offer timelines across the region. The key distinction I kept coming back to was this: buyer hesitation and pricing error look similar from the outside but require completely different responses. Adjusting price in response to hesitation that is not actually about price is a mistake.
The outcome
The seller trusted the original strategy. We held. The property ultimately closed within approximately $10,000 of the initial list price. That result was not visible from the quiet July weeks. It required staying committed to an analysis that the early silence was trying to argue against. What July 2025 gave me was a cleaner picture of what market hesitation looks like when it is disconnected from fundamental pricing problems.
"The market did not crash. It went quiet. And quiet and wrong are not the same thing. We held the price, and the seller closed within $10,000 of where we started."
Margot Skelley is a REALTOR at Compass Real Estate in Wolfeboro, NH, specializing in luxury lakefront and waterfront properties across Carroll County. She is the author of The Skelley Report, a monthly market letter published the first Friday of each month.