Your listing gets one first week

When your house hits the market it gets a burst of attention it will never get again. Every buyer with a saved search, every agent with a matching client, every neighbor who is curious. That window is your best shot, and what you do with it sets the tone for everything after.

Which is why the "let's list high and see what happens" strategy works so poorly. You spend the window on a price that filters out your actual buyers, then you reduce, and now the listing carries days on market and a reduction, both of which read as weakness. You end up negotiating from behind on a house that would have sold cleanly at the right number.

Priced correctly, the opposite happens. Multiple people see it in the same few days. That is where competition comes from, and competition is worth more than any negotiating cushion you thought you were building in.

Same logic on preparation. If the photos go up before the house is ready, you have spent the attention burst on a house that was not showing well. You cannot re-run it.

The whole argument for the boring pre-listing work is that it is all in service of ten days you only get once.