Selling
Start before the sign goes in the yard.
Most of what determines how a sale goes is decided before the listing is live: what you fix, what you leave alone, how the home is positioned, and when you go. By the time the photographer arrives, the important choices have already been made.
Before anything is listed
What we look at together.
None of this requires you to have decided anything. It is the groundwork that makes a decision possible.
- What the records actually say
- Public records are the starting point, and they are often wrong or incomplete about the thing that matters most — how big your home is. County records may describe above-ground area and basement area separately, with no statement of how much of the basement is finished. That gap changes how your home compares to anything else.
- Condition, honestly
- What a buyer will notice walking in, what an inspector will find, and which of those two lists is worth spending money on. These are not the same list.
- What else a buyer can choose
- Your home is priced against the alternatives available that month. Understanding what a buyer is comparing you to is more useful than any single estimate of your own home.
- Your actual timeline
- Whether you need to move, want to move, or are deciding whether to move at all. These lead to genuinely different strategies, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Preparation
I would rather talk you out of work than watch it not come back.
Sellers routinely spend money on improvements that do not change what a buyer is willing to pay. The useful question is never “does this look better” — it is what specific objection this removes, and whether that objection is worth the cost of removing it.
Worth doing
- Repairs that would otherwise become an inspection objection
- Anything that makes the home read as cared for
- Work that removes a visible reason to offer less
- Documentation: permits, invoices, warranties, improvement dates
Usually not
- Renovations chosen to taste rather than to market
- Work that costs more than the objection it removes
- Upgrades that a buyer would redo anyway
- Anything started without knowing what it is meant to fix
Which list an item belongs on depends on your home and the buyers competing for it. That is the conversation, and it is worth having before the first invoice.
Pricing in context
The market decides what your home is worth.
Not an online estimate, not the county assessor, and not me. My job is to show you the evidence behind a number so you can see how it was reached — what has recently sold, what buyers are currently choosing between, and where those signals disagree with each other.
They often do disagree. An automated estimate, a past sale price and the homes currently listed nearby can point in three different directions. When that happens I would rather show you the disagreement than resolve it with a guess and present the guess as a conclusion.
Timing
When to go is a real decision.
Your timeline, the preparation you choose and what else is on the market all interact. Sometimes the answer is to move sooner with less work. Sometimes it is to take three months and go in stronger. Sometimes it is to wait, and there is no version of this where I push you off that.
What I will not do is manufacture urgency to get a listing signed.
Through to closing
Positioning, negotiation, and staying in touch.
Positioning
How your home is presented and described shapes who comes to see it. The aim is that the right buyers understand what they are looking at — and that the things worth noticing are documented rather than left to be discovered.
Negotiation
Everything is negotiable, and price is only part of it. Dates, inclusions, repairs and contingencies all move. In a transaction that holds together, both sides give a little — I say that early so it is not a surprise later.
Execution
I review every document with you before you sign it, and I deal directly with the agent on the other side. When something needs to move, I call. Most deals that go sideways do it quietly, in the gaps between people.
And then
Selling is usually half of a bigger move.
Most sellers are also going somewhere. Sequencing the two — what you list, what you buy, and in which order — is its own decision, and it is worth planning at the same time rather than afterwards.
Find out what you are working with.
A Home Intelligence Report is where this starts: what the records show about your property, what the market is signalling, and what is worth confirming before you decide anything.