SELLER REPRESENTATION
How I sell a home
Four decisions really matter: the price, the preparation, what buyers see, and how the offer gets handled. Here’s how I think about each one, so you can argue with me before we start rather than after.
Pricing
The price has to answer the market, the house, and everything else a buyer could go look at instead. Not the number that wins me the listing.
Before we set it, I’ll walk you through the comparable sales behind my recommendation. If your number and my number are different, you’ll have what you need to make the call. It’s your house.
Overpricing has a predictable shape. Buyers wait, the house sits, and by the time you reduce, the days on market are doing the talking for you. Starting in the right place is worth more than any single marketing decision I can make later.
The call I’d rather make early
This market is strange right now. Pricing is all over the map, sales are thin, and there isn’t much recent data to anchor to. Good homes sit sometimes, at numbers that looked right the day we set them.
So if your listing isn’t moving, I phone you. I’ll tell you I’m not seeing the momentum, that I don’t think the trajectory gets us a sale at this price, and that I think we need to adjust.
Then we go back through everything we’ve already done. The photography, the exposure, the changes we made along the way, the feedback from every showing. If there’s a lever still unpulled, we pull it first. But when the marketing is fully covered and the traffic still isn’t converting, price is the last lever we’ve got.
Nobody enjoys that call. You will never get three months into a listing wondering what I actually think.
Preparation
You’ll get a practical checklist and you can work through it at your own pace. Not every project improves the sale. Plenty of them just cost you money and delay the launch.
Where the work is worth doing, I’ll connect you with trades I actually use and help you get real quotes. Six years as a journeyman HVAC technician is useful here: I have a reasonable idea of what a buyer will care about and what they’ll walk straight past.
Media and presentation
Photography, video, drone and floor plans on my listings are handled by me. They’re not added to your costs at completion.
Photography
High-resolution stills, shot properly, of a house that has been prepared first.
Aerial and 3D
For anything where the setting, the elevation or the lot is part of what you're selling.
Video
A moving walk-through, for homes where arriving is the experience.
Floor plans
More important than most sellers think, and non-negotiable on a vacant home.
Virtual staging
For empty houses, where buyers can't judge the scale of a room.
Exposure
The listing needs to be where buyers are actually looking. For the right property, it also needs to reach people who weren’t looking yet.
Local buyers and out-of-town buyers don’t find or judge a home the same way. The plan should account for that instead of treating exposure as a box to tick.
Negotiation
An offer is not just a price. Dates, conditions, and how much leverage each side thinks it has will all move the outcome.
This is where the mechanical-room years pay off again. When an inspection comes back with a list, I can argue the actual scope of the work instead of conceding a number to keep things pleasant.
What this looks like on real homes
224 Lost Creek Court, listed at $1,389,900 and sold in 30 days after six months with a previous agent.
A sale with tenants in place — listed at $924,900 with two tenancies in the building and showings limited to three days a week.
Downsizing out of a custom build, a custom rancher priced to the buyers its features were built for rather than to the neighbourhood average. Accepted offer inside two weeks.
Things sellers ask me before they list
Can I sell my house with tenants in it? Yes. The showing rules, the three month notice, and the timing that catches sellers out.
Does Poly B hurt my home’s value? The honest answer, and why Poly B insurance in BC is the real mechanism rather than leaks.
Does geothermal increase my home’s value? Loop fees, service intervals, and why publishing the number beats letting a buyer imagine one.
Can I buy a house before I sell mine? The three ways to sequence it, and how bridge financing works in BC.
