When a seller is dug in on an overpriced listing, no magic lever exists. Your best move is figuring out why they're selling. Motivation matters more than any formula. Have your agent call the listing agent and ask where the price came from and what's driving the timeline. A hard deadline elsewhere means room to negotiate; a seller just testing the top of the market usually won't budge no matter how you word the offer. Reset your read on "stale" too. Three weeks, even a couple of months, is short by traditional standards. Homes used to sit 60, 90, even 100 days as a matter of course. And a listing obviously priced above its neighborhood, say a home in a $650,000 area asking $725,000 and sitting, often belongs to a seller who was never truly motivated. A lowball rarely lands there. Base your offer on where you genuinely believe the value is, using recent sales of similar homes in similar condition. Leave predictions of a coming crash out of the number, and be careful leaning on comps from a hotter, faster stretch, since those sales reflect different conditions. If you truly want the place, make your offer and let the number speak. Sometimes the only real options are to wait for a price adjustment or move on to the next one.