1,883 West Michigan Homes That Did Not Sell
Between September 2025 and September 2026, 1,883 residential listings across West Michigan came off the market without selling. They were expired, cancelled or withdrawn. Every figure on this page comes from one pull: a flexmls Residential CMA of listings as of September 4, 2026, drawn from six MLS boards.
The number that should change how a seller thinks is this one. 848 of the 1,883, or 45.0 percent, never reduced their asking price once. They came off the market still at full asking price, after a median of 49 days. The market had already answered, and the price never moved to meet it. The same figures, alongside city medians and waterfront records, are collected in our answers to the questions West Michigan buyers and sellers ask most.
The reconciliation, so the rest of the page can be trusted
| Status | Listings | Median original asking | Median final asking | Median days on market | Median cumulative days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expired | 1,232 | $364,950 | $350,000 | 77 | 87 |
| Withdrawn | 93 | $299,900 | $295,000 | 43 | 46 |
| Cancelled | 558 | $429,900 | $424,950 | 64 | 74.5 |
| All three | 1,883 | $375,000 | $365,900 | 72 | 81 |
Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
The counts and the price medians above match the MLS's own computed summary block exactly. The days on market medians reproduce within one day, because 31 of the 1,883 rows carry a blank days on market cell and drop out of that median. We publish the one day gap rather than round it away. A page that admits a one day discrepancy can be trusted on the other forty numbers.
Almost half never moved their price
| Group | Listings | Share | Median days on market | Median cumulative days | Median original asking |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never reduced | 848 | 45.0% | 49 | 62 | $389,900 |
| Reduced at least once | 1,005 | 53.4% | 85 | 90 | $369,900 |
| Raised | 30 | 1.6% | not reported | not reported | not reported |
Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
Read those two rows in the right direction. Listings that reduced sat a median of 85 days. Listings that never reduced sat a median of 49. Cutting a price does not cause a listing to sit longer. Sitting is what produces the cut. A seller who watches 85 days go by reduces; a seller whose listing comes off after 49 days usually never gets that far. The 85 is a symptom of the delay, not its cause, and reading it the other way around gets the decision exactly backwards.
How far the ones that cut actually cut
| Reduction from original asking | Listings | Share of all 1,883 |
|---|---|---|
| 5 percent or more | 540 | 28.7% |
| 10 percent or more | 216 | 11.5% |
| 15 percent or more | 86 | 4.6% |
| 20 percent or more | 33 | 1.8% |
| 25 percent or more | 15 | 0.8% |
Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
Among the 1,005 listings that reduced at least once, the median reduction was $20,000, against a median original asking price of $369,900 in that group, or 5.3 percent. The asking price removed from the market by those reductions totals $34,977,228.
The largest single reduction in the set was $1,100,000, from $6,600,000 to $5,500,000, on a listing that recorded 245 days on that listing and 418 cumulative days.
The most expensive homes sat longest and cut least
| Original asking price | Listings | Median days on market | Median cumulative days | Share that reduced | Median reduction among those that reduced |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under $300,000 | 650 | 64.5 | 70.0 | 56% | 6.4% |
| $300,000 to $500,000 | 652 | 56.5 | 68.5 | 52% | 4.4% |
| $500,000 to $800,000 | 333 | 83.5 | 92.0 | 55% | 4.7% |
| $800,000 to $1.5M | 176 | 103 | 116 | 51% | 6.0% |
| $1.5M and above | 72 | 150 | 171 | 38% | 8.4% |
Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
A failed listing above $1.5M sat a median of 150 days against 56.5 days for one between $300,000 and $500,000. Across the same two bands, 38 percent of the $1.5M and above listings had moved their price at all, against 52 percent of the $300,000 to $500,000 listings. The most expensive homes waited the longest and adjusted the least, and when they did adjust they cut deepest, a median 8.4 percent against 4.4 percent.
A relisted home looks newer than it is
215 of 1,852 listings, 11.6 percent, carry a cumulative days on market higher than their own days on market. Among those 215, the median days on market is 54 and the median cumulative days on market is 158. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
The mechanism is simple. Days on market resets when a listing is withdrawn and entered again as a new listing. Cumulative days on market does not; it follows the property. So a home showing 54 days has, in the median case among those 215, actually been available for 158. Nothing on the fresh listing tells a buyer which of the two they are looking at.
What a seller should take from it. Relisting resets the counter a buyer sees. It does not reset the counter the record keeps, and the second attempt inherits the first one's history whether or not anyone asks about it.
What a buyer should ask. What is the cumulative days on market on this property, and has it been listed before at a different price. Both are in the record. Neither is on the listing.
The same houses keep coming back
The 1,883 listings resolve to 1,684 unique address and city combinations. 132 of those addresses came off the market more than once, accounting for 279 of the listings. 14 addresses failed three or more times. Setting aside one first attempt per address, 147 of the 1,883 listings, or 7.8 percent, are a repeat attempt at an address that had already failed. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026. MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes MLS. Residential property, status Cancelled, Expired or Withdrawn, status change dates September 2025 through September 2026.
The deepest case in the set is an address that came off the market four separate times, starting at $349,900 and ending at $250,000. That is a decline of $99,900, or 28.6 percent, across four attempts. Three other addresses failed three times each, on price paths of $429,000 down to $299,900, $695,000 down to $560,000, and $525,000 down to $479,500.
What a seller should take from this
The first list price is the decision that determines every decision after it. Nothing else on a listing is as hard to undo. Photography can be reshot, a description rewritten, a showing rescheduled. A price that opened above the market cannot be unopened, because the buyers who saw it at that number have already moved on and the record of how long it has been sitting keeps counting.
A listing gets its best weeks first. The buyers already searching that price range see it in the first days it appears, and they see it exactly once at that price. A home priced above what those buyers will pay spends its most valuable attention being ruled out, and by the time the price comes down the audience it was aimed at has stopped looking.
The cost of being wrong is measured on this page.
None of that is an argument for pricing low. It is an argument for pricing against evidence, and then acting on what the first two weeks of response actually say rather than what the price was hoped to be.
How we price and sell
What that looks like in practice. Across the trailing 12 months as of August 2026, the Luke Bouman Team sold 95 homes as the listing agent, at a median of 9 days on market and a median of 99.9 percent of list price. 47 of those 95 closed at or above the asking price. Source: MichRIC MLS.
The Luke Bouman Team is the Lakeshore's most reviewed real estate team, with 450+ five-star Google reviews and over 1,000 five-star reviews across all major platforms.
Frequently asked questions
How many West Michigan homes did not sell in the last year?
1,883 residential listings across West Michigan came off the market between September 2025 and September 2026 without selling: 1,232 expired, 558 cancelled and 93 withdrawn. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026, across six MLS boards.
How long does a home sit before the listing expires?
The median failed listing recorded 72 days on market and 81 cumulative days between September 2025 and September 2026. Expired listings sat a median of 77 days, cancelled 64 and withdrawn 43. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026.
How much do sellers cut their price before giving up?
1,005 of the 1,883 reduced at least once, at a median reduction of $20,000 against a median original asking price of $369,900 in that group, or 5.3 percent. 848 of the 1,883, or 45.0 percent, never reduced at all. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026.
Why does a relisted home show fewer days on market than it has been for sale?
Days on market resets when a listing is withdrawn and entered again as a new listing, while cumulative days on market follows the property. 215 of 1,852 failed listings, 11.6 percent, showed a cumulative figure higher than their own, at a median of 54 days on market against 158 cumulative. Source: flexmls Residential CMA, listings as of September 4, 2026.
Method and limitations
- Six MLS boards, and no failure rate. This pull spans MichRIC, Realcomp, MIRealSource, Greater Lansing REALTORS, Water Wonderland and Northern Great Lakes. The sold datasets published elsewhere on this site are MichRIC only. Dividing 1,883 by a sold count drawn from a different set of boards would produce a number that measures nothing, so no failure rate appears anywhere on this page. We publish the terms these datasets are released under, including the limitations that travel with every figure. Waterfront is measured separately again: homes with direct Lake Michigan frontage sold 52 times over the trailing 12 months at a median of $1,412,500, data as of August 28, 2026, source MichRIC MLS.
- City-level breakdowns are not published here. The per-city assignment in the underlying export could not be verified to our own standard, and a figure we cannot verify does not go on the page.
- Expired, cancelled and withdrawn are three different acts. A listing expires when its agreement runs out with the home unsold. It is cancelled when the agreement is ended early. It is withdrawn when the home is taken off the market while the agreement stands. They are counted together here because in all three the home did not sell, but they are not the same decision and their medians differ.
- This measures attempts, not homes. A home that came off the market here and later sold under a new listing is still counted here as a failed listing. That is deliberate: the question this page answers is what happens to listings that do not sell, not how many homes never sell.
- The one day reconciliation gap. Counts and price medians match the MLS summary block exactly. Days on market medians reproduce within one day, because 31 rows carry a blank days on market cell and drop out of that median.