For home sellers
Two different transactions. We handle both, and we will tell you straight which one you are actually in.
We price against real comparable sales in your neighborhood, not a guess, so you list at a number that attracts offers instead of sitting stale.
Professional photography and staging recommendations that help your home make a strong first impression online, where most buyers start.
We handle showings, offers, and paperwork start to finish, so selling stays off your daily to-do list.
Selling the house you live in and selling a property you have owned as an investment are not the same transaction. They have different buyers, different timelines, different paperwork and completely different things that go wrong. Most listing pages are written as though every seller is a family moving across town.
We do a lot of both, so it is worth saying up front which one you are, because the advice diverges almost immediately.
If it is a rental, the first question is not what it would list for. It is whether selling beats holding, and that is an arithmetic question before it is an emotional one. We run both paths side by side: what the property nets you if you keep renting it, what you walk away with if you sell now, and how long you would have to hold for the keep-it case to catch up.
Your equity position matters, and so does something people leave out of spreadsheets entirely, which is where you are in life and what you want to happen to this asset eventually. A property that makes sense to hold for another decade makes a different kind of sense if your heirs are going to inherit it, and a different kind again if you are trying to be done with landlording.
We can give you a straight answer here because we get paid either way. A firm that only manages rentals has a quiet interest in telling you to keep renting. A brokerage that only sells has the opposite. We do both, so the recommendation is not doing any work for us.
A lease does not evaporate because the property changed hands. It generally goes with the house, which means your buyer inherits your tenant, your rent, your renewal date and your security deposit obligation. That is the single most common surprise in these sales, and it is better understood before you list than during inspection.
The practical work is access and notice. Your tenant has a right to reasonable notice before someone comes through, and they have no particular incentive to make your sale convenient. Showings have to be scheduled around a household that lives there. We handle that directly rather than leaving you to negotiate it, which is usually the difference between a property that shows well and one that quietly does not get shown.
The deposit has to be dealt with properly at closing, and the lease and payment history need to be assembled for the buyer. If we already manage the property, we have all of that. If we do not, gathering it is the first thing we do.
Whether to sell it occupied or wait for the lease to end is a real decision with money on both sides, and it usually comes down to what a vacancy would cost you against what the wider buyer pool is worth. We will work that out with you rather than defaulting to whichever is easier.
This is the part that catches investment sellers off guard. With a lease running, a buyer who wants to live in the house generally cannot take possession until that lease is up, and owner-occupant financing typically expects them to move in within a set window. That thins out the retail pool considerably.
So you are often selling to another investor, and an investor is not buying a kitchen. They are buying a return. They will price it off the rent, the condition, the expenses and what they think the turn will cost, and staging will not move them much. The marketing, the pricing logic and the timeline all change accordingly.
That is not bad news. It is simply a different sale, and it is one we are unusually well set up for, because the buyers who want tenant-occupied rentals in this market are largely the same people we already talk to every week.
The hard part here is rarely the listing. It is the logistics of being in two places at once. You have to time a sale against a purchase, and the two do not naturally line up. Sell first and you may not have anywhere to go. Buy first and you may be carrying two payments.
There are real ways to bridge that, and which one fits depends on your equity and your risk tolerance rather than on what is easiest for us: making your purchase contingent on your sale, negotiating a possession date that gives you room, or arranging to stay in the house for a short period after closing so you are not moving twice. Each has a cost, and one of them is usually clearly better for your situation.
We would rather have that conversation before your house is on the market, because by the time you have an accepted offer your options have narrowed to whatever the contract says.
Pricing comes off real comparable sales, adjusted for condition and finish rather than pulled from an automated estimate. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: too high and the listing goes stale and you end up negotiating from weakness, too low and you left money behind on day one.
Professional photography, because essentially every buyer sees the house on a screen before they see it in person, and honest advice about which prep work will actually return more than it costs. Not every recommended improvement is worth doing.
Then showings, offers, negotiation and paperwork, which is the part you are hiring out. You should hear from us about decisions that are yours to make and not much else.
Yes, and it happens all the time. The lease generally transfers with the property, so your buyer takes on your tenant and the existing terms. The trade-off is that it narrows your buyer pool mostly to investors, which affects price and marketing. We will show you both scenarios with numbers before you decide.
You will need their cooperation for access regardless, and they are entitled to reasonable notice before showings, so handling it openly tends to go much better than trying to work around them. We manage that communication so you are not the one having the awkward conversation.
Yes. We manage property and we sell it, so the answer does not change what we earn. We have told owners to hold, and we have told owners the honest thing is to sell even though we were managing it for them at the time.
It has to be accounted for and handed over properly at closing rather than simply kept. If we manage the property we already hold the records; if not, reconstructing them is part of getting you ready to list.
No. Roughly as much of our listing work is ordinary homeowners moving house, which is why the logistics of timing a sale against a purchase are on this page at all.