Relisting without a steep price cut is considered a long shot in luxury real estate. One Orlando-area firm is making it a repeatable strategy by rebuilding the buyer profile from scratch.
When a luxury home expires off the market, the standard playbook is predictable: find a new agent, drop the price by 15 to 20 percent, and hope the reset attracts fresh attention. According to Bent Danholm, a real estate professional and founder of Danholm Collection, the price is rarely the core problem with a failed listing. The problem, in most cases, is that the home was marketed to the wrong buyer, and no amount of discounting fixes a positioning failure.
More than 90 percent of Danholm’s listings over the past couple of years have been expired or canceled listings that his firm has remarketed. His track record on those relists suggests that the conventional response to an expired listing, aggressive price reduction, is often a misdiagnosis of what actually went wrong.
Why Expired Listings Fail in the First Place
Danholm’s starting point with any expired listing is a diagnostic question: why didn’t this sell? The answer, he says, is almost never as simple as price. More often, the original listing failed because it was built around the wrong buyer profile, or no coherent buyer profile at all.
Most luxury listings, in his view, are marketed generically. They describe the property’s features, list its upgrades, and rely on broad exposure to surface a buyer. This approach assumes that the right buyer will self-identify from a wide audience. But at the $2 million-plus level, the pool of qualified buyers is small enough that generic marketing becomes a significant liability. If the listing isn’t reaching the specific type of person most likely to want that home, and speaking directly to that person’s lifestyle priorities, it will sit.
The 16689 Broadwater Avenue property in Winter Garden illustrates the pattern. The home had been on the market for approximately 10 months with a prior agent, listed at roughly $2.25 million. It was a seven-bedroom, seven-bathroom waterfront property with more than $300,000 in upgrades. By most measures, it was a strong listing. But it hadn’t sold.
Danholm’s assessment was that the home had been positioned incorrectly, marketed as a feature-rich property rather than as a specific lifestyle match. “They were not sort of focused on the things that the house had,” he says.
Rebuilding the Buyer Avatar
Danholm Collection’s response to an expired listing is not to adjust the existing marketing strategy. It is to discard it and start over with a full buyer avatar reconstruction. That process begins with the property itself, its location, community, amenities, and the lifestyle it enables, and builds outward to a detailed profile of the person most likely to purchase it.
For the Winter Garden property, that profile pointed toward large families or internationally relocating households expecting frequent visitors, with a net worth between $5 million and $10 million or annual income in the $800,000 to $1.8 million range. The avatar also identified what this buyer was not: someone primarily motivated by water sports or pool access. The home had lake access but no dock and no pool. Rather than treating those absences as deficits to be managed, Danholm repositioned the home around what it did offer – a quiet neighborhood, a strong school district, proximity to trails and a well-regarded farmers market, and a fully upgraded move-in-ready interior.
The marketing that followed was built entirely around that profile. The two-page upgrade list from the previous listing was set aside. “I don’t think it’s relevant,” Danholm says. “They can see these things. It doesn’t matter whether it was $500 or $5,000. They either like it or they don’t like it. What we’re trying to sell is the dream of living in this home.”
The result: the property went under contract in 74 days. The neighborhood average at the time was approximately 120 days. Danholm notes this was actually his firm’s slowest sale in that neighborhood; the other two comparable properties they listed averaged around 35 to 36 days, but attributes the longer timeline to the reputational headwind of relisting an expired property without a price reduction. “When you take an expired listing on, and you’re not reducing the price, you’re already fighting an uphill battle,” he says.
What Beating the Market Average Actually Requires
The buyer avatar does not always predict exactly who will buy. In a Keene’s Point listing, Danholm’s firm generated three offers after a contract was signed – two from buyers who matched the predicted profile closely, and one from a buyer who came from the anticipated geographic area and had the right income and family structure but a different occupation than expected. The home sold to that third buyer.
The point is not that the avatar must be perfectly accurate. Having a specific, well-researched buyer profile shapes every downstream decision – pricing, narrative, channel selection, and timing – in ways that generic marketing cannot replicate. “When you have people who are genuinely interested and where their lifestyle matches the home you’re selling, you also get better offers,” Danholm says. “And in quite a few instances, you also get competing offers.”
The research that underpins this process typically adds only a few days to the pre-listing timeline. But those days, in Danholm’s experience, compress the selling period significantly. “If you want us to do this in total quicker than most people, then we need to take the time to prepare, and then the actual selling time should be shorter – usually is shorter,” he says.
How the Pre-Launch Process Works
Danholm Collection has built its practice almost entirely around the expired and canceled listing segment, a niche that most agents treat as a last resort rather than a specialty. The firm’s pre-launch process typically spans about 10 days before a home goes live: neighborhood and sales research, buyer avatar construction, staging if needed, and media production including photography, videography, and drone footage.
Danholm describes the firm not as a neighborhood specialist but as a marketing specialist – one that operates across multiple communities because the core skill is buyer psychology, not local inventory knowledge. “We’re more your marketing expert,” he says. “I don’t have a particular neighborhood that I’m an expert in, and I know everything about.”
For sellers whose homes have already failed once on the market, the implication is direct: the listing’s previous failure may not require a lower price. It may require a different answer to a more basic question: who, specifically, is this home for?
Danholm Collection is a luxury real estate brokerage based in Central Florida, specializing in properties above $1.5 million. Learn more about their approach at danholmcollection.com.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
