How long does it take to sell a house?

Two clocks, and people conflate them. The first is time on market, which is governed almost entirely by price and condition — priced correctly and prepped properly, most Central Florida homes find their serious interest early. The second is contract to closing, which runs about 30 to 45 days on a financed offer and can be two weeks on cash. Homes that sit for months are nearly always priced ahead of their condition.

What does it actually cost to sell a house in Florida?

Budget for: the real estate commission you agree to (negotiable), documentary stamp tax on the deed at $0.70 per $100 of the sale price outside Miami-Dade, title and closing fees, prorated property taxes, an HOA estoppel fee if you're in an association, any repair credits you negotiate, and your prep costs. On a $450,000 sale that commonly totals $35,000–$45,000 before your mortgage payoff. The seller net sheet will give you your own number.

Do I have to pay the buyer's agent?

No — and since 2024 it isn't automatic or a fixed rate. Buyers now sign written agreements with their own agents covering what those agents get paid. Whether you offer anything toward it is a marketing decision with real trade-offs on both sides, and you should make it deliberately rather than inherit it. I'll walk you through the trade-off for your specific property.

Can I sell my house myself?

Yes. Flat-fee services will even put you in the MLS. The part people underestimate isn't the marketing — it's the thirty days between contract and closing, where the inspection response, the appraisal gap, the underwriting conditions, the insurance binder, the title search and the association estoppel all land on you, while you negotiate against the buyer's professional. Some sellers should absolutely do it. Read the detour section above and decide honestly.

What's the most common reason a home sale falls apart?

Financing, by a distance — unmet underwriting conditions, a buyer who changes their financial position mid-escrow, or an insurance problem that makes the property unaffordable to carry. Appraisal and inspection problems get more attention because they're visible and negotiable. The loan is the one that dies quietly at day forty.

Should I sell before I buy?

It's the genuinely hard one, and the answer depends on your equity, your current interest rate, how much of the next purchase depends on these proceeds, and how tight inventory is where you're going. What matters most is having a real plan for the gap — contingencies, a post-occupancy agreement, a bridge, or somewhere to sleep for three weeks — decided before you list, not improvised in week five.

How a Home Is Sold | The Whole Process, Illustrated Step by Step

The Starting Line

Everything that happens before a stranger can see your house. This is also where the largest, quietest money is won and lost.

Step 1 · Before a single photo gets taken

Start with the number that isn't the price

Almost everyone opens this process at the wrong end: what's my house worth? That's the fun number. The number that decides whether selling is a good idea at all is your net proceeds — the sale price minus your mortgage payoff, minus the commission you agree to, minus documentary stamp tax, minus title and closing fees, minus the property taxes you owe for your part of the year, minus whatever the buyer negotiates out of you after the inspection.

On a $450,000 Central Florida sale, the gap between the price on the sign and the wire that hits your account is routinely $35,000 to $45,000 before your mortgage payoff. Nobody enjoys that sentence. Everybody should read it in month one rather than week eleven.

There's a second question hiding behind the first: where do you go next? Selling a home you also have to replace, in the same market, at the same time, is a completely different plan from selling a rental you'll never live in again. The plan follows the answer, not the other way round.

You, the sellerThe listing agent

$12,000 Finding out at the closing table

Sellers who never run a net sheet meet their real equity two weeks before closing, and then either kill a good deal or close on terms they resent. Call it $12,000 of closing costs nobody budgeted for.

Where I earn the fee

I build you the net sheet before you commit to anything — with your actual payoff letter and the county's actual figures, not a percentage I guessed at. If the honest answer is that you shouldn't sell right now, that's a legitimate outcome of the meeting and I'll say so.

Run your own numbers first →

Check yourself

Your home sells for $450,000. Which number actually tells you whether selling was a good decision?

Step 2 · The most expensive decision on this entire page

Price against closed sales, not against hope

Here is the mechanic that costs sellers the most money, and it is not intuitive: the deepest pool of buyers for your house sees it in the first two weeks, and never comes back. Those are the people who have been looking for three months, have their financing done, and are ready today. Price above them and you don't get offers you can negotiate — you get silence.

Then comes the spiral. A reduction. Another. An offer below what you'd have been given on day one, except now the listing carries ninety days on market and three price cuts, and every buyer's agent in the county reads that history as something is wrong with this house. You end up negotiating from the weakest position in real estate: visibly motivated.

A portal estimate is a computer's guess assembled from public records it has never been inside. It doesn't know you re-piped the house, and it doesn't know the lot backs a retention pond. Zillow publishes its own median error rate and it is materially worse for homes that aren't already listed — worth looking up before you treat one as a price.

You, the sellerThe listing agentThe buyer

$9,000–$22,500 Overpricing the first two weeks

Model it: list 8% high, correct over three reductions, and you typically land 2–5% under what a correct day-one price would have produced. On $450,000 that's $9,000 to $22,500 — plus three more months of mortgage, taxes and insurance.

Where I earn the fee

I'll show you the closed comparable sales I used, the adjustments I made to each one, and what is actively competing against you right now. If the honest number is lower than you hoped, you'll hear it before you sign with me — I'd rather lose the listing than spend four months grinding you down to the number I should have told you in week one.

Check yourself

Why does overpricing for just the first two weeks cost so much more than it looks?

Step 3 · Roughly $4,000 well aimed

Spend money only where it comes back

Most sellers over-invest in the wrong rooms. A new countertop rarely returns what it cost. Paint, lighting, landscaping, a genuinely deep clean and a completed punch list nearly always do — because buyers don't price your finishes, they price neglect. Twenty small broken things (the sticking door, the running toilet, the dead bulbs, the loose handle) are individually trivial and collectively read as a house that hasn't been looked after. That invites a lowball far bigger than the cost of fixing them.

Declutter harder than feels reasonable — roughly a third of the furniture and most of the personal photographs. Rooms photograph larger and buyers can actually picture themselves in them.

Florida specifics get priced separately and ruthlessly: the roof, the age of the air handler and condenser, and any water staining anywhere. Your buyer, their inspector and their insurance carrier will each look at those. If the roof is near the end of its life, we decide what to do about it now, while you still have leverage — not during the inspection period, when you have none.

You, the sellerThe listing agent

$16,000 Listing it as-is when it didn't need to be

A well-aimed $4,000 prep budget routinely moves a $450,000 sale by $15,000–$20,000. Skipping it doesn't save the money — it moves it to the other end of the transaction, where the buyer takes it.

Where I earn the fee

I walk the house and hand you a list ranked by return, with the don't bother items marked as clearly as the must-dos. Then — and this is the part most agents can't offer — I can send the crews. My company runs cleaners, handymen and trades across Central Florida every day. Most agents recommend the work. I can get it done.

Check yourself

Which of these usually returns the most per dollar spent before listing?

Going Public

How a house becomes a listing — the database almost nobody explains, and the websites that copy it.

Step 4 · The listing agreement and the disclosure

Sign the two documents that decide everything else

The listing agreement hires your agent. It sets the term, the price, the compensation and the cancellation rights. All of it is negotiable — commissions always have been — and all of it should be in writing in front of you before you sign. Read the cancellation terms before you read the price. If an agent won't put a specific number and a specific exit in writing, that tells you something.

The seller's disclosure is where you tell the truth about known material defects. The instinct to stay quiet about the 2019 leak is exactly backwards, and it's the one on this page that can follow you for years. Disclosed problems get negotiated. Undisclosed problems get litigated — after closing, once you've already spent the money.

Since 2024 there's a third decision: whether to offer anything toward the buyer's agent's compensation, and how much. It is no longer automatic and it is not a fixed rate. It's a marketing decision with real trade-offs, and you should be making it deliberately rather than inheriting it.

You, the sellerThe listing agentThe buyer's agent

$15,000–$50,000 A known defect you didn't disclose

Legal fees plus the repair plus, in the bad version, a sale unwound — long after you've moved and spent the proceeds. Easily $15,000 and realistically much more.

Where I earn the fee

I'll tell you plainly what belongs on the disclosure and what doesn't, quote you a specific commission for your specific property in writing, and explain exactly what each piece of it buys — including the prep work, photography and marketing I'm bringing.

Check yourself

A seller knows a bedroom flooded four years ago and was properly repaired. The safest move is to…

Step 5 · The part nobody ever explains

Your house becomes a database record

Your home does not “go on Zillow.” It goes into the MLS — a private, paid database that cooperating brokerages use to publish listings to each other. In Central Florida that's Stellar MLS. Everything you will ever see on a consumer website is a downstream copy of that record.

Which means the MLS fields are your listing. Square footage, year built, the HOA and flood fields, the room dimensions, the remarks, the photo order, whether any of it matches the county's tax record. An error there propagates to a dozen websites within hours, and some errors come back as a renegotiation. If the tax record says 1,907 square feet and the appraiser measures 1,840, that argument arrives in week four with your deal already in motion.

MLS rules also govern when a publicly-marketed home has to be entered, and what limited “office exclusive” or delayed-marketing options exist. Those policies have genuinely been changing over the last couple of years, so the right move is to ask what your MLS's current rule is rather than assume the one you read about last year still applies.

The listing agentThe MLSThe buyer's agent

$5,000–$20,000 One wrong field

A bad square-footage, HOA-fee or flood-zone entry surfaces during appraisal or underwriting, and you renegotiate from behind — or the buyer walks and you start over with days on market already spent.

Where I earn the fee

I fill the fields myself and check them against the county record before it goes live. Where the record and reality disagree — and they do more often than you'd think — I tell you first, so we choose how to handle it instead of discovering it mid-contract.

Check yourself

Where does your listing actually live?

Step 6 · Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Homes.com

The portals copy it — and sell the people who look

Within hours your MLS record is syndicated out to the big consumer sites and a long tail of smaller ones. It's worth understanding their business clearly, because almost no seller does: they are advertising companies. They are not paid when your house sells. They are paid for the attention your listing collects. An inquiry on your home is routinely routed to an agent who bought that ZIP code — someone with no connection to your listing at all.

Two practical consequences. First, the data drifts. One site shows the wrong bedroom count, another resurrects a price history from 2016, a third prints an automated estimate underneath your asking price where every buyer will read it as a second opinion.

Second — and this one costs money — views are not a market signal. “We got 4,000 views on Zillow” tells you approximately nothing. Saves, shares and actual showing requests tell you whether the price is right. Sellers who price off view counts talk themselves into holding firm for another three weeks.

Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Homes.comThe buyerThe listing agent

$3,000–$10,000 Pricing off portal noise, or letting bad data sit

A stale or wrong listing on a major portal, or a decision made off view counts instead of showing requests, typically shows up as one avoidable price reduction later.

Where I earn the fee

After launch I check the major portals, get the wrong ones corrected, and report the numbers that mean something — showings booked, second showings, saves, and what buyers' agents actually said — instead of a view count designed to make both of us feel busy.

Check yourself

How do the big listing portals make most of their money?

For sale by owner, honestly

The fork: selling it yourself

You can absolutely do this, and some people genuinely should — if you already have your buyer, if you're selling to a relative or a tenant, if you're experienced and have the time. What changes is worth being precise about rather than scary about.

MLS access: Without a broker you're not in the MLS, and the MLS is the distribution. Flat-fee services will enter your listing for a few hundred dollars, which solves distribution. It does not give you representation, and those are separate products.
Showings and screening: You'll be letting strangers into your home, and you won't know which of them are actually pre-approved. That's a safety question and a time-wasting question at once.
You negotiate against a professional: Your buyer almost certainly has an agent. You'll be negotiating an inspection credit and an appraisal gap against someone who does exactly that several times a month, and who represents the other side.
The middle thirty days: Most of the work in a sale isn't marketing — it's holding the deal together through inspection, appraisal, underwriting, insurance, title and the estoppel. Stations 10 through 13 on this page. That work doesn't disappear when you go FSBO. It lands on you.
The statistic everyone quotes you, honestly: The industry's annual survey puts for-sale-by-owner at a single-digit share of sales, at a lower median price than agent-assisted sales. But that comparison is confounded and anyone quoting it as a clean “you'll lose X%” is overselling: a large share of FSBO sales are to a relative or a known party at a pre-agreed price, and cheaper homes are over-represented. The honest version is simpler — you save the listing-side fee, and you take on the risk, the time and the negotiation.

Where I'd be honest with you

If you tell me you want to try it yourself, I'll tell you straight whether your situation is one of the ones where it works. And if you get to contract and the middle thirty days start going sideways, call me anyway — I'd rather help you land it than be right about it.

The Offer

Attention is front-loaded and decays fast. Then a contract arrives with nine decisions in it, only one of which is the price.

Step 7 · Attention is front-loaded and it decays

The first fourteen days are the whole marketing plan

Every buyer with a saved search matching your house gets notified within forty-eight hours. Every agent with a matching client sees it that week. After roughly two weeks you are no longer selling to the accumulated pool of ready buyers — you're selling to the trickle of new ones entering the market. Same house, a fraction of the audience.

So the launch has to be finished on day one. Professional stills, a walkthrough video, a measured floor plan, correct fields, a lockbox that actually works. Buyers self-select from photographs before a human being ever walks in, which makes photography the last place to save money. “We'll add the rest of the photos Thursday” spends your best week.

And the most common self-inflicted wound in this whole process: making the house hard to show. Two-hour notice windows, no weekends, nap schedules, a dog that has to be moved. Every declined showing is a buyer who saw three other houses that afternoon instead. It is miserable and it is temporary, and it is worth it.

The buyerThe buyer's agentThe listing agent

$9,000–$13,500 A soft launch and restricted showings

An incomplete launch plus hard-to-book showings typically adds 30–60 days on market and a 2–3% reduction — $9,000–$13,500 on $450,000, before the extra carrying costs.

Where I earn the fee

Nothing goes live until it is complete. I concentrate showings rather than scattering them, and you get written feedback weekly — including the sentence you don't want to hear, in week two instead of month three.

Check yourself

When does a listing get the most qualified attention it will ever get?

Step 8 · Read it in this order

An offer is nine decisions. Price is one of them

When an offer lands, read it in this order — not from the top. Who's funding it (cash, conventional, FHA or VA, each with different appraisal and property-condition rules). How much earnest money, which is the only real measure of how serious they are. The inspection period — under Florida's standard AS IS contract the buyer can cancel during that window for any reason at all and take their deposit back, so its length is a live grenade you're agreeing to hold.

Then: the financing contingency and its deadline, appraisal language, the closing date, what personal property conveys, seller concessions, and finally the number.

Worked example. A $455,000 offer with a fifteen-day inspection period, a 3% concession request and an FHA loan can easily net you less — and close far less reliably — than $445,000 cash with a five-day inspection and no concessions. The higher number is the one sellers accept. The second one is usually the better deal.

The buyerThe buyer's agentThe listing agentThe buyer's lender

$10,000–$18,000 Taking the headline number

The difference in net between the highest offer and the best one on a $450,000 sale runs $10,000–$18,000 — and that's when it closes. When the weak one collapses at day 45, add the damage of going back on the market stale.

Where I earn the fee

Every offer goes through a net sheet, side by side, before you see my recommendation. And I call the buyer's loan officer before we respond. Two minutes on the phone tells me whether that pre-approval is a real underwritten approval or a form letter.

Check yourself

Under Florida's standard AS IS contract, during the inspection period the buyer can generally…

Step 9 · Then the clock starts

Counter the terms, not just the price

The counteroffer is where an experienced agent earns the fee, and almost none of it happens in the price field. Shortening the inspection period. Capping your repair obligation at a fixed dollar figure. Adding appraisal-gap language that says who covers a shortfall before anyone knows there is one. Tightening the financing deadline. Requiring proof of funds rather than a screenshot. Each of those is worth real money, and not one of them changes the headline number.

The moment it's executed you are under contract, and the whole thing turns into dates. Inspection ends on this day. Loan approval by that day. Closing on this one. These deadlines are not gentle and they are not approximate — missing one can hand the other side a right to cancel, or cost you a deposit you thought was protected.

This is also the moment to stop improving the house and start preparing to move. The negotiation isn't over — it just moves to the next room.

The listing agentThe buyer's agentYou, the seller

$5,000–$15,000 A missed contractual deadline

Blown deadlines transfer leverage instantly. Depending on which one, the price is a renegotiation you didn't have to accept, the deposit, or the deal.

Where I earn the fee

I counter in writing with a calendar attached, and I run the deadline list. It is not your job to remember that the financing contingency expires on a Tuesday — that's the job you hired out.

Check yourself

Which of these most improves your position without changing the sale price at all?

Where Deals Die

You are under contract. Roughly one in five of these fall apart, and nearly all of the failures happen in these four rooms.

Step 10 · Four hours, then a repair request

The inspection, and the second negotiation

The buyer hires an inspector. Expect a long report photographing everything, including a great many things that are completely fine — that's the job, and the report is written to protect the inspector as much as to inform the buyer. Your buyer will read it at midnight and panic. A day or two later their agent sends a repair request.

How you answer matters more than what's on the list. Concede the safety items and the active defects: the leak, the exposed wiring, the failing breaker. Push back on maintenance and cosmetics — you sold an eleven-year-old house, not a new one, and the buyer knew its age when they offered. Know your leverage too: yes, they can walk, but they have now spent money on this house and in most cases they want it.

Two Florida documents often matter more than the inspection itself: the four-point inspection (roof, electrical, plumbing, HVAC) and the wind mitigation report. Those are insurance documents, and what they say determines whether the buyer can afford to insure the house at all — which is station twelve's problem, arriving early.

The home inspectorThe buyerThe listing agent

$6,000–$14,000 Conceding the whole list

Sellers who negotiate the repair request from fear routinely give away $6,000–$14,000 in credits they didn't owe. Sellers who refuse everything on principle sometimes lose the buyer outright. Both are expensive; the middle is cheap.

Where I earn the fee

We go through the report line by line and split it into must, negotiable and no, with a real cost estimate against each one — often from my own trades. A number from a licensed contractor I work with every week is a very different negotiating instrument from the buyer's contractor's estimate.

Check yourself

The buyer's inspection report lists 41 items. The usual right response is to…

Step 11 · And you have exactly four options

A stranger decides what the bank will lend

If the buyer is financing, their lender orders an appraisal through a management company. Nobody chooses the appraiser, nobody may pressure them, and you will never speak to them. They pull closed comparable sales, adjust for differences, and produce a number.

Come in at or above the contract price and nothing happens — you'll barely hear about it. Come in low and there are exactly four outcomes: the buyer brings the difference in cash, you reduce the price, you split the gap, or the deal dies. There is no fifth option and no appeal to the lender, because the lender will not lend against a number its own appraiser didn't support.

Which of the four you get is mostly decided by whether your contract has appraisal-gap language in it — a decision made back at the counteroffer, weeks before anyone knew there was a problem. That's the pattern for this entire unit: the things that save you here were bought earlier.

The appraiserThe buyer's lenderThe buyer

$15,000 A low appraisal with no gap language

A $450,000 contract appraising at $435,000, with nothing in the contract about who covers a shortfall, is a $15,000 conversation you are having from behind — or a dead deal.

Where I earn the fee

I give the appraiser a written packet — my comps, the improvements you made, the dates and the costs. That's entirely allowed and it is regularly useful. And if it still comes in low, I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth disputing or whether the appraiser is right and the contract was optimistic.

Check yourself

The appraisal lands $15,000 under the contract price on a financed deal. Which is not one of your options?

Step 12 · Where most dead deals actually die

Underwriting and insurance: the people you never meet

While you're worrying about the inspection, an underwriter you will never speak to is deciding whether the buyer's loan is real. They issue conditions: updated bank statements, a letter explaining a deposit, a homeowners-association questionnaire, proof of insurance, a verification of employment done again three days before closing. Any one of them can stall for a fortnight.

And buyers sabotage themselves constantly. They finance a car, open a store card for furniture, move money between accounts, or change jobs during escrow — and re-run their approval into the ground. It is not rare. It is one of the most common ways a clean-looking deal disappears at day forty.

Florida's own version of this is insurance. If the buyer cannot get a policy at a price they can afford, there is no closing, no matter how good the loan is. Roof age is usually the reason — many carriers become difficult past roughly fifteen years on a shingle roof, and the four-point report is where it surfaces. A sixteen-year-old roof is a conversation in week three whether or not you want to have it.

The buyer's lenderThe insurance carrierThe buyer

$10,000–$20,000 A deal that dies in underwriting at day 40

You go back on the market carrying forty days on market and a visible failed contract. The re-list typically clears $10,000–$20,000 lower, two months later, with carrying costs on top.

Where I earn the fee

I stay in weekly contact with the loan officer and ask for the outstanding condition list by name. A stall then shows up as a question in week two rather than a catastrophe in week six. And I'll tell you at the listing appointment whether your roof and your four-point are going to be a problem, so it isn't a surprise to either of us.

Check yourself

A financed buyer's purchase is most often derailed in the final weeks by…

Step 13 · The public record has a long memory

Title and estoppel: everything still attached to the house

The title company searches the public record for everything that follows the property rather than the person: your mortgage, a second you forgot about, a contractor's lien from a job you disputed, an old judgment, a solar loan filed as a UCC lien on the equipment, unpaid municipal code liens, an heir on a deed who never signed anything. Any of these has to be cleared before the deed can transfer.

There's a specifically Florida trap here: the open permit. A permit pulled in 2016 for a water heater or a lanai and never inspected or closed out sits on the property forever, and closing it can take weeks of scheduling with a county inspector.

If you're in an HOA or a condo association, the closing agent orders an estoppel certificate — the association's official statement of exactly what the unit owes and what transfers to the buyer. It costs money, Florida law caps the fee and sets a delivery window (worth asking for the current figures, they've been amended), and associations are frequently slow. Ordered late, it becomes the reason your closing moves.

The title companyThe associationYou, the seller

$2,000–$25,000 A title defect or open permit found in week five

Anywhere from a $2,000 nuisance and a delayed closing to a $25,000 lien you'd forgotten and a buyer who has run out of patience waiting for it to clear.

Where I earn the fee

I ask about permits, liens, solar equipment, prior owners and estate issues at the listing appointment — before we're under contract and on somebody's clock — and I push the estoppel order at the start of the contract period rather than at day twenty-five.

Check yourself

An estoppel certificate is…

The Finish Line

The money gets divided in public, on one page — and then there's a tax year attached to it.

Step 14 · One page, every line item

Closing day: where the money actually goes

You'll receive a settlement statement — the buyer gets a Closing Disclosure — itemising every dollar. On a Florida seller's side that typically includes your mortgage payoff, the real estate commission as agreed, documentary stamp tax on the deed at $0.70 per $100 of the sale price in every county except Miami-Dade (which has its own rate and surtax), the owner's title insurance policy where local custom puts it on the seller, prorated property taxes, the estoppel fee, any repair credits you agreed to, and recording costs.

On $450,000, documentary stamps alone are $3,150. Who customarily pays for the owner's title policy genuinely varies by county in Florida — and it is negotiable everywhere — so it should have been settled in the contract, not assumed at the table.

Florida property taxes are paid in arrears, which means you credit the buyer for the portion of the year you owned it. And read the statement the day before, not in the room. Errors happen — a stale payoff figure, a duplicated fee, a proration run to the wrong date — and every one of them is dramatically easier to fix before six people are sitting at a table waiting on you.

The title companyYou, the sellerThe buyer

$500–$5,000 Not reading the settlement statement until you're at the table

Misapplied prorations, duplicated fees and stale payoff figures are common and correctable — but only if somebody checks before closing day.

Where I earn the fee

I read the statement line by line against the contract before you ever sit down, and I chase the payoff letter and the estoppel figures myself so they're current rather than approximate.

Check yourself

On a $450,000 Florida sale outside Miami-Dade, documentary stamp tax on the deed comes to about…

Step 15 · Don't let this one find you in April

After the keys: the part with a tax return attached

You sign, the buyer's lender funds, the deed records, and the money is wired — usually the same day in Florida, though funding can slip past the signing. Keys transfer at funding unless you negotiated a post-occupancy agreement to stay a few days, which should be in writing with a daily rate and a deposit, not agreed on a handshake. Cancel your homeowners policy after the deed records, not before.

Then the tail. The closing agent files a 1099-S reporting the sale. If it was your primary residence and you lived there two of the last five years, the Section 121 exclusion may shelter up to $250,000 of gain — $500,000 filing jointly. If it was a rental, depreciation recapture applies and a 1031 exchange may be worth considering, but a 1031 has to be set up before the sale closes. After closing it is simply too late, permanently.

If you're a foreign person for tax purposes, FIRPTA withholding applies and has to be handled at the closing table. Keep every document; you'll want that settlement statement at tax time. And none of this paragraph is tax advice — it's the list of things to raise with your CPA while there's still time to act on them.

You, the sellerThe title company

$10,000–$60,000 Doing the tax planning after closing

A missed 1031 exchange on an investment property is the extreme case and it is unrecoverable — the entire deferred gain becomes taxable because a form wasn't set up before the closing date.

Where I earn the fee

I raise the tax questions at the listing appointment and get you talking to a CPA before the closing date rather than in April. I'm not your tax adviser — but knowing which question to ask, and when, is worth real money and costs nothing.

Selling as a foreign owner? Read the FIRPTA guide →

Check yourself

A seller wants to 1031-exchange into another investment property. When does that have to be set up?

Step	The mistake	Illustrative cost
1	Finding out at the closing table	$12,000
2	Overpricing the first two weeks	$9,000–$22,500
3	Listing it as-is when it didn't need to be	$16,000
4	A known defect you didn't disclose	$15,000–$50,000
5	One wrong field	$5,000–$20,000
6	Pricing off portal noise, or letting bad data sit	$3,000–$10,000
7	A soft launch and restricted showings	$9,000–$13,500
8	Taking the headline number	$10,000–$18,000
9	A missed contractual deadline	$5,000–$15,000
10	Conceding the whole list	$6,000–$14,000
11	A low appraisal with no gap language	$15,000
12	A deal that dies in underwriting at day 40	$10,000–$20,000
13	A title defect or open permit found in week five	$2,000–$25,000
14	Not reading the settlement statement until you're at the table	$500–$5,000
15	Doing the tax planning after closing	$10,000–$60,000
Midpoint total, if every one of them went wrong		$221,750

How a home is actually sold

Twelve parties, and only one of them works for you.

You, the seller

The listing agent

The buyer

The buyer's agent

The MLS

Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Homes.com

The buyer's lender

The appraiser

The home inspector

The title company

The insurance carrier

The association

The Starting Line

Start with the number that isn't the price

Where I earn the fee

Price against closed sales, not against hope

Where I earn the fee

Spend money only where it comes back

Where I earn the fee

Going Public

Sign the two documents that decide everything else

Where I earn the fee

Your house becomes a database record

Where I earn the fee

The portals copy it — and sell the people who look

Where I earn the fee

The fork: selling it yourself

Where I'd be honest with you

The Offer

The first fourteen days are the whole marketing plan

Where I earn the fee

An offer is nine decisions. Price is one of them

Where I earn the fee

Counter the terms, not just the price

Where I earn the fee

Where Deals Die

The inspection, and the second negotiation

Where I earn the fee

A stranger decides what the bank will lend

Where I earn the fee

Underwriting and insurance: the people you never meet

Where I earn the fee

Title and estoppel: everything still attached to the house

Where I earn the fee

The Finish Line

Closing day: where the money actually goes

Where I earn the fee

After the keys: the part with a tax return attached

Where I earn the fee

Add it up.

That's the whole process.

Where to check me

The ones I get asked first.

Where this goes next

Your seller net sheet

Working with me to sell

Buying at the same time?

Wherever you are on that map, I'll tell you the truth about it.

Get a straight answer