Chelse Moffatt

Get fully underwritten before you tour a single house. Not pre-qualified, underwritten. In a market this tight, that's the difference between an offer that gets read and one that gets skipped. Then do the math before you fall in love. Decide your real walk-away number at the kitchen table on a calm Tuesday, not at nine at night when offers are due at noon. In Rochester, list price is a starting bid, not a value, so build your budget from what homes are actually closing at. And be careful what you waive to win. There's almost always a way to make an offer competitive without betting your savings on a roof nobody looked at.

Start earlier than you think you need to. The sale takes weeks. Getting the house ready, sorting through what's inside it, and getting everyone with a say on the same page takes months. Almost nobody regrets starting early. Plenty of people regret calling me in April about a June move. Second, price on evidence, not on what you need to net. Buyers don't care what you paid, what you owe, or what your neighbor got in 2022. Your first two weeks on the market are the most attention your house will ever get, and an ambitious number spends all of it on nothing. Third, don't renovate for a buyer you haven't met yet. Paint, decluttering, lighting, and landscaping return more than a new kitchen does, and they're a fraction of the cost.

All kinds, and the range I notice most isn't price point, it's temperature. I've worked with people who were thrilled to be moving and people who were dreading every minute of it, and those two need completely different things from me. Past that: buyers relocating from out of state and out of the country, investors, upsizers, downsizers, parents buying a first house for a kid, and adult children selling a parent's home. Price points from luxury down to a small investment property that needed everything. The common thread is that I adjust to you. Some clients want the spreadsheet and every comp. Some want me to tell them the one thing to do next. Both are fine.

A client came to me after she'd moved her mom into senior living. The house was full of a lifetime of belongings, and the daughter had a young family of her own, and she was trying to manage all of it from the middle. We took it in order. Estate sale first, then the cleanout, then cleaning, then market. I gave her vetted contacts for each piece, was on site to let people in, and went through every quote with her before she hired anyone. The part she still brings up is that I drove out to her mom's senior facility for the signings. Asking her mom to come sit in an office would have turned a hard day into a harder one. The house sold. But that's not the part I'm fond of. The daughter never once had to figure out what came next by herself.

I started as an admin. Before I ever sat across from a client, I was the person processing the file, chasing the missing signature, and watching what actually happens between contract and closing. I learned how the business runs before I learned how to sell. That turned out to be backwards in the best possible way. Most agents learn to win the client first and figure out the operations later, if they ever do. I got the operations first, so by the time I had my own clients I already knew exactly where deals fall apart and how to keep them from getting there. It's still how I work. Five hundred transactions later, the admin brain is the whole advantage.

I'm a trained coach. I coach agents nationally through Keller Williams MAPS Coaching, and coach training is close to the opposite of sales training. It teaches you to ask better questions and help someone reach their own decision instead of steering them toward yours. Applied to a client, that means I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to lay out your real options, show you the numbers under each one, and make sure you understand the tradeoffs before you choose. The numbers half matters just as much. I can show you exactly how I arrived at a price, what your net looks like across a few different scenarios, and what the data says versus what the market feels like. Those are often two very different things.