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Representation
Selling an estate.
Six weeks of work happen before your house is visible to anyone. That preparation is most of why our campaigns are short.
The sequence
What happens after you say yes.
It starts on paper. We pull the survey, the permit history and the assessor's file, and read them before we form an opinion about price. On waterfront we add the elevation certificate, the seawall engineering if any exists, and the dock and lift permits. About a third of the time something in that stack is wrong or missing, and it is far cheaper to fix it in week one than to have a buyer's inspector find it in week seven.
Then Camille measures the house. Every listing leaves this office with a floor plan drawn to scale from her own site measurements, not a builder's marketing plan and not a room count. Buyers at this level are almost always thinking about a change — a wall, an addition, a primary suite reconfigured — and a real plan lets them have that conversation with their architect during the first week rather than after an offer has cooled.
Photography is two days, one of them ending at dusk, with an architectural photographer rather than a real estate photographer. Rooms are shot straight, at eye level, unstyled beyond removing what does not belong. We do not use wide-angle distortion, virtual staging or a sky replacement, because every buyer who arrives having believed a photograph arrives annoyed. From that we build a printed offering document and a document file: plan, survey, permits, elevation, insurance history, and the answers to the six questions we know will be asked.
Pricing is built from closed county records and from comparables we have physically walked, adjusted for the things a portal cannot see — the depth at the dock, the direction the frontage faces, the year the roof actually went on. Theo prepares it, and he will show you the working. If our number is below what you hoped, you will hear that in the first meeting.
Then the quiet part. For ten to fourteen days the property is shown only to our own buyer list and to two or three brokers we trust with a confidence, before any public listing, sign or portal. A meaningful share of our sales end there, which is the point: a house that transacts inside its first-look window never accumulates the days-on-market history that invites a discount later.
Whatever happens after that, showings are conducted by Camille or Theo. You get a written note the same evening, including the objections, and a call from one of us every Friday until it closes.
Questions
The three we are asked first.
What does it cost to have you sell the house?
We work on a negotiated fee agreed in writing before the listing agreement is signed, and it covers everything we do: the survey and permit research, the measured floor plan, both photography days, the print offering, the private first look and every showing. There are no marketing invoices passed on afterwards and no administrative or transaction fee at closing. Compensation offered to a buyer's broker is a separate line, decided by you, and we will tell you what we think it should be for your property.
How long does a campaign run from signature to closing?
Preparation takes two to four weeks, mostly waiting on the survey and the photographer's dusk window. The private first look runs ten to fourteen days. Our median time from going public to an accepted contract is eleven days, and a cash closing then takes another two to three weeks, or thirty to forty-five days with financing. Historic houses generally run longer through diligence, and we will say so at the outset rather than promise you the median.
Will you take a listing outside Davis Islands, Hyde Park and Bayshore?
No. We will tell you within a day and give you the names of two brokers who work your street properly. It costs us listings every year and it is the reason our local knowledge is worth anything. The one exception in fourteen years has been a downtown apartment for a client of fifteen years, and we told her plainly that she was getting our loyalty rather than our expertise.
Buying rather than selling? See buyer representation, or the terms of private client work.