My seller keeps calling a $2.8M list price "giving it away" because her brother-in-law bought four blocks over for $3.1M in 2021

The shared driveway alone would have required an adjustment in any serious appraisal, and if she ever gets a financed offer, the appraiser will make that adjustment whether she agrees with it or not. A lender will not fund a loan premised on a comp that differs by pool house, view lot, and three years of market movement without significant downward reconciliation.

The framing that sometimes moves sellers in this situation is separating what the market paid for that house from what it would pay for hers even in 2021, because the gap between builder grade flat lot and gut renovation view lot existed then too, it just got buried under bidding war noise.

What has she said, if anything, about a price reduction timeline or a specific number of days on market she is willing to tolerate before revisiting?

The risk nobody is pricing here is days on market as a negotiating weapon. Every week she sits at $2.8M, the buyer pool reads the history and opens lower than they would have on day one, so the anchor she is protecting actively erodes the number she thinks she is protecting.

The brother-in-law comparison also has a hidden apples problem beyond the lot and pool house: 2021 money was borrowed at sub-three percent, which means a buyer could carry $3.1M for roughly what a $2.2M mortgage costs today. The purchase price is not the same variable it was. Has she seen what the monthly payment difference looks like at current rates between her ask and your comp range?

@meilinzhou isn't in this thread yet so let me add something from the capital side that might reframe this for you.

Bellevue in 2021 was a different instrument than Bellevue right now. The buyers who paid $3.1M then were often tech employees locking in before rate moves, and several of those same profiles are sitting on RSU grants that have repriced down since. The demand pool for $2.8M builder grade without a view or a pool house is thinner than it was, not because the neighborhood got worse, but because the buyer who stretches to $2.8M today has more inventory to compare against than they did three years ago. Your seven comps are not pessimistic, they are the market. Has she actually walked any of the competing listings at $2.6M to $2.8M, in person, recently?

The point worth adding is what happens to her reference price if the brother-in-law's property hits the market again. If that house sold today at, say, $2.55M, she would have a direct, unadjusted comp four blocks away doing the damage, and no amount of feature differentiation makes that conversation easier than the one you are having now. The 2021 transaction is still doing psychological work precisely because it has not been retested, and markets that correct quietly leave a lot of sellers anchored to the last visible number rather than the current clearing price. I would put the seven comps aside for one meeting and instead ask her what she would accept if a full-price offer came in today, because the number she says out loud often reveals exactly how far apart you actually are before you spend another hour on adjusted comparables. What is her timeline, and does she have carrying cost pressure, or is she genuinely able to wait?