You do not have to be selling to know your number

Almost everyone who asks me what their house is worth is not planning to sell it.

They are doing something else, and I think it is worth naming, because the industry tends to treat every question as the beginning of a transaction and that is exactly why people stop asking.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY DOING

They are checking. It is the largest thing they own, and they would like to know it is behaving sensibly. That is a completely reasonable thing to want and it does not require a decision attached to it.

The trouble is that asking usually means signing up for something. A call, a walkthrough, a follow up sequence. So people go to a website, get a number generated by an algorithm that has never seen inside their house, and quietly conclude that it is probably close enough.

It usually is not.

WHY THE ONLINE ESTIMATE MISSES

It cannot see condition, which is the single biggest variable on these streets. In Poinsettia Heights, sales over the last eighteen months ran from $242 to $882 a square foot. An algorithm cannot tell which end of that a house sits on, because it has never seen the roof.

It also over weights the most recent nearby sale regardless of how comparable it actually is.

A DIFFERENT WAY TO DO IT

Tell me the number that would make you move.

Not what you think it is worth. The number that would actually make you pick up the phone and start packing. It can be optimistic. Optimistic is useful information.

If a buyer at that number turns up, you hear about it. Until then nothing happens at all. No sign in the grass, no photographs, nobody walking through on a Sunday afternoon.

WHY I WORK THIS WAY

Because most of the good sales I have been part of started years before the listing, with someone who knew their number and was not in a hurry.

And because a name and a number is the entire commitment. You can withdraw it in a sentence, and some people do, and that is completely fine.

If you want to know where your house sits first, ask for that instead. I will send it in writing.

Tell me your number → gabrielleditommaso.com/contact