List the 3.5M house at drywall or wait until the last light fixture is in

Pre-listing a luxury flip before completion keeps coming up and the room seems genuinely split. The argument for going live at drywall is that you start the days-on-market clock while you're still spending, and if a buyer shows up at that stage you can let them pick the final stone and hardware, which turns a spec house into something closer to a custom build. Every month you shave off the post-completion hold is 25k or 30k of carry you never pay.

The argument against is that the high-end buyer pool is small and mostly one pass deep. They see the house once, and at drywall they see plywood and a portable toilet, and they price the risk of your finish choices instead of trusting them. You also hand them a renegotiation hook every time a schedule date slips, and you burn days on market while the house can't photograph. In a segment where the listing history is the first thing an agent pulls, a long stale record on a finished house is its own discount.

Disclosure of what's known about the property differs by state, and so does whether sale prices are even public, so how visible any of this is to the buyer's agent depends on where you are.

Where do you actually go live?