-By Steve Miller

Coldwell Banker Real Estate on Friday will launch a 10-day event that will reduce prices on homes for sale by up to 10% in most major U.S. markets. While home sellers have the final say on the price, Coldwell will offer a special reduced price listing on its Web site.

The sales event will be supported by a national radio campaign on several stations, including ABC and Westwood One. Coldwell will take over the homepage of HGTV.com on Oct. 13 and will run banner ads on a number of Web sites. Participating local offices will run listings in newspapers with creative highlighting the 10-day event. Home sellers will have their listings posted on Coldwellbanker.com.

Half of Coldwell's 3,000 offices across the U.S. will participate in the event, including the country's most troubled housing markets: Las Vegas, Miami, Detroit, northern California and the New York City region.

The promotion was created after an in-house survey of 3,379 Coldwell agents found that 56% felt listing prices were still too high to attract qualified buyers. The survey also found that 77% of agents agreed the majority of sellers still hold unrealistic expectations regarding the initial listing price of their homes.

"We created this [event] to help the buyers and sellers connect," said Michael Fischer, svp-marketing at Coldwell, Parsippany, N.J. "There has been a divide that we hope this can address, and it gives sellers a chance to take this one-time price deduction as we generate a national buzz to get people out and looking at homes."

Fischer added that the sell-down marketing approach is a tactic right out of the auto industry's playbook. And Fischer should know—he has held marketing positions at Nissan and Toyota before coming to Coldwell in February.

Mark Broderick, senior analyst at Guideline, New York, agreed that the Coldwell promotion "will get some buyers out there," but he said it wouldn't address the surplus of national housing inventory.

"A lower price won't reduce volume that quickly," Broderick said. "And it won't get people who are renting to start looking for a home, which is what is really needed."