The crews go first. A tile setter who does clean work in a $450k house may be excellent and still unable to hold a consistent reveal or install a book-matched slab, and at $1.4M the buyer's inspector and often the buyer's own designer will find it. More supervision doesn't fix that. You change subs, and the ones who can do it cost more and book further out.
Your agent is next. Selling near the top of a market runs on relationships, and an agent who moves starter homes quickly may not know the handful of buyer's agents who effectively control your buyer pool. Ask anyone you're considering how many sales they've closed above your target price in that specific submarket, and ask for the addresses.
Then the evidence thins. At $450k you might have twenty recent comparable sales to lean on. At $1.4M you might have four, and roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, so what you can even see depends on where you are. Your resale estimate carries a wider range as a result, and the buyer's appraisal can still come in below your agreed price after you've found the buyer.
Carry is what turns those problems into losses. Interest, taxes, insurance, utilities and staging all get bigger while the expected time to a buyer also gets longer. That combination is the real difference between your two price points, and it's why the size of your reserve matters more here than the size of your projected margin.
