No one sale should make or break a neighborhood. If the average exposure time necessary to get a sale at a reasonable price is 4 or 5 months, that 4 or 5 months starts when the listing price is set at a reasonable level. Being compelled to sell faster changes the conditions of sale from being a market sale (willing seller under no undue pressure to sell) to being a quick sale or liquidation sale. In other words, such a sale is no longer a market sale, per se.
When it starts to get tricky is when a bunch of sellers are compelled to sell. Once it becomes common it is no longer a case of “undue pressure”. Such sales can and do set the market values for everything else because they represent the readily available substitution for the sales that are not discounted.
Saying that a seller is compelled to sell now in a listing is like begging for a further 5% or 10% reduction on every offer that comes in. I wouldn’t read too much into what happens on this sale unless you start seeing several of them.
