The Houston Listing Plan

Based on recent sold comparables — not actives or pendings — what is the realistic market value?

Here is what we will commit to instead. Within 48 hours of walking each property you get a written valuation built on closed sales only, filtered to:

• Closed in the last 90 days — six-month comps in a moving market are history, not evidence.
• Within a half mile, and inside the same school attendance zone where that changes value.
• Within ±15% of your square footage, same story count, same garage configuration.
• Adjusted line by line for condition, lot, updates, and seller-paid concessions — a comp that closed at $310,000 with $9,000 in concessions is a $301,000 comp.

The report shows the comps we rejected and why, because that is where an inflated number usually hides. Actives and pendings appear in it too — but under "competition," never under "value." What is listed next door tells us who we are up against. Only what closed tells us what a buyer, an appraiser and an underwriter all agreed to.

What price would you recommend if the goal is to sell within 30 days?

• The market number — what it should bring in the neighbourhood's normal days-on-market.
• The 30-day number — typically 2–4% under the market number, positioned so it sells inside four weeks with real competition among buyers.
• The ceiling — the highest defensible ask, with the honest trade: more money if it works, more days and a price-cut history if it doesn't.

The 30-day number is chosen with search brackets in mind. Buyers do not browse; they filter in bands. A home asking just above a round-number break is invisible to every buyer whose filter stops at that break:

One more piece of arithmetic worth knowing before you pick: a listing gets more showings in its first fourteen days than in the following sixty. That attention is spent whether or not the price is right. Pricing to sell in 30 days means spending it once, well.

How often will you monitor the market and recommend a price adjustment if showings or offers don't come?

The report is not something squeezed in between showings. It is produced every Wednesday by our in-house marketing staff, led by Brandon on our team, which is why it arrives on the same day every week rather than when someone remembers.

Agreeing the triggers up front matters more than the reporting. It means the day-14 conversation is a decision we already planned, not a negotiation about whether there is a problem.

No price ever changes without your written approval. Our job is to bring you the numbers and a recommendation. The decision stays yours, every time.

What is your strategy if we get significant interest but no offers?

When buyers keep touring and nobody writes, they are all stopping at the same thing. So we find out what it is:

• Every showing agent gets a phone call within 24 hours — not a survey link. The question is "what stopped them?", and then silence until they answer it.
• Objections get grouped. If three or more agents independently name the same thing — the kitchen, the roof age, the street noise, the layout — that is the actual price of the home, quoted in a different currency.
• We fix that one thing. A repair credit, a hazard removed, one room restaged, a re-shoot. Often a few hundred dollars answers an objection that was costing five figures.
• Everyone who toured gets a reason to come back — the improvement, and a deadline.
• We set an offer-review date. Buyers who like a house but feel no urgency wait. A published review date converts interest into paper.

And before cutting: on a financed buyer, a seller-paid rate buydown often moves more buyers than the same money taken off the price, because it changes the monthly payment far more than a small price reduction does. Same cost to you, much bigger change to them. Where that is the right move, you will see both numbers side by side.

Will professional photography, virtual tours, drone photography or a video walkthrough be used?

• Professional HDR photography, with the lead image chosen for the search grid rather than for the frame.
• Drone for lot lines, roof condition, and how close the property really is to what buyers care about.
• 3D walkthrough so out-of-town and relocating buyers can tour at 11pm and arrive already sold.
• Video walkthrough, cut both horizontal for the listing and vertical for social, with Spanish captions.

The timing rule matters as much as the list. A listing that goes live with phone photos "while we wait for the photographer" spends its single best week of buyer attention looking like a home nobody cared about. Those first-week impressions cannot be bought back later.

How will you make the property stand out against competing homes in the same price range?

• Answer the questions before they're asked. Pre-listing inspection, a sewer scope where the age of the house warrants one, the survey, and receipts for prior work — all loaded into the MLS documents. A buyer's agent who can already see the roof age, the inspection and the repair receipts has nothing left to discount for. Uncertainty is the most expensive thing in a listing.
• Sell the payment. Because Alan owns a mortgage company, we can publish a real monthly payment and a buydown option alongside the price. Competing listings in your band show a number; yours shows what it costs to live there — and that is the number buyers are actually comparing.
• Never miss the call. Our AI answers buyer and agent calls around the clock and books the showing on the spot, and the home’s own landing page sets appointments while the buyer is still looking at the photos. Competing listings in your band send weekend callers to voicemail.
• Own the thumbnail. The lead photo is chosen for how it reads at postage-stamp size in a search grid, not for how handsome it looks full screen. That one decision moves click-through more than any other single choice in the listing.

What is your listing commission, and what is offered to the buyer's agent?

Since the 2024 settlement changes, buyer-agent compensation is negotiated separately from ours and is no longer advertised in the MLS. That is not a fee you avoid by setting it to zero — buyer agents ask their clients to cover it, and those clients frequently ask you to cover it back inside the offer. It is a term that appears in the negotiation either way, so the question is who negotiates it well.

We negotiate it on every single file. Here is the arithmetic on a $350,000 sale:

Two things that follow from that table. The spread between the best and worst outcome on the buyer side is $10,500 on a $350,000 house — which is why we treat it as a negotiation and not a box to fill in. And there is a floor under all of it: if it doesn't sell, you owe no commission at all.

Full breakdown of what it costs to sell in Houston →

Are there any additional marketing or transaction fees I should expect?

Photography, drone, 3D walkthrough, video, the property website, ads, flyers and the staging consult are all funded by us up front. You never get a bill for them while the home is on the market, and if the listing runs its term without selling, you owe nothing at all. The only thing that puts those costs back on the table is cancelling early — and in that case the $2,400 buys the media outright and you keep it. Question 20 has the detail.

The rest of what you pay at closing is not ours and we don't control it: title policy, escrow and recording fees, survey if a new one is required, prorated taxes, HOA transfer and resale certificate, and any payoff or lien. You get a written net sheet with all of it before you sign the listing agreement, and an updated one with every offer we look at. That bottom-line figure is what you should judge us on, not the commission line.

Are there circumstances where I could owe a commission even if the property doesn't sell?

• The protection period. If a buyer who was introduced to the property during the listing comes back and buys it shortly after the listing ends, commission is still owed. Ours is 90 days. Its purpose is to stop a buyer and a seller waiting out the agreement in order to cut the agent out of a sale the agent produced. Its effect, when an agent sets it long, is to tie you up for the better part of a year. Ask every agent you interview for that number and compare them — some are 180 days, and it is rarely volunteered.
• You accept an offer and then don't close for a reason within your control. At that point the agreement has been performed.
• You sell it yourself, or to someone already in conversation with you, during the term. Which is why anyone you are already talking to gets named as a written exclusion at signing — bring us that list and it goes in the agreement.

Outside of those three, if the listing runs its term and the property does not sell, you owe no commission and no $500 fee. What is above is a plain-English summary of how the Texas listing agreement works, not legal advice; we will walk you through the actual paragraphs line by line before you sign anything, and you should take as long as you want with them.

What's the process for terminating or changing the listing agreement if I'm not satisfied?

By the time a listing is live we have paid for the photography and drone, the 3D walkthrough and video, the property website build and its launch, the ad spend, and the print collateral. None of that is invoiced to you while the home is on the market, and none of it comes back to us if the listing simply runs its term without selling. The $2,400 covers those hard costs in the one case where the work is stopped before it has had the chance to earn — and it is the same number whether you cancel in week two or week ten.

What makes it different from every other cancellation fee you will be quoted: the money buys the work, and the work goes with you. On release we hand over the digital assets outright, yours to use for the rest of the term you originally signed —

• All professional photography, full resolution, including the drone set.
• The 3D walkthrough and the video, in every cut we produced.
• The property website, and the listing copy in English and Spanish.

A seller who cancels a listing almost anywhere else starts from zero: new agent, new photographer, another two weeks off the market while the media is re-shot, and the old photos are gone because they belonged to the brokerage. Here you walk out with the whole package and your next agent can put the home back on the market the same week. That is the difference between a fee that punishes you for leaving and a fee that buys you something.

What we are not doing is holding you hostage. A seller who wants out and can't get out is a seller we can't help anyway, and one bad review costs more than one held listing earns. We would rather be kept by performance than by paperwork.

On term length, our minimum is 6 months. That is honest to how the plan actually works: the media, the ad spend and the agent-to-agent outreach are all paid for up front, and the compounding part — the second wave of agent outreach, the re-approach of everyone who toured, the buyers who circle back after a price change — happens well past week four. A 90-day listing asks us to spend the money and then hand back the months where it pays off.

What keeps that from being a trap is the paragraph above: the 6 months is a term, not a lock. You can end it at any point for $2,400, which means the only thing holding the listing together after month one is whether you still want us on it.

Changes short of termination are easier still. Price, marketing and terms all change by written amendment at any time, with your signature.