When Nancy Lam upgraded in January to a home closer to her child’s school in the San Francisco Bay Area, she thought she had plenty of time to list her old house, a five-bedroom modern home in the sought-after suburb of Lafayette.
After all, the pandemic had sent the luxury housing market soaring, and homes across the country were seeing aggressive bidding wars and selling for sky-high prices. Ms. Lam, a business professor, and her husband, who works in healthcare and declined to be named, took their time sprucing up the house in a bid to get the best possible price for the home, which they had bought for $1.67 million in 2014.
