Selling Your South Florida Home When You Are Not Here
Selling from another state or another country? We have spent years helping South Florida homeowners handle the entire sale from wherever they happen to be.
One of the questions I get often from sellers who do not live here is how they are supposed to sell a home in South Florida when they are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
The answer is pretty simple. You do not have to be here. We do.
Chris and I have represented sellers living all over the United States and around the world. We have sold South Florida homes for owners living in Canada, Europe, Latin and South Americas and South Africa. We represented an FBI agent while he was working in the Middle East and a military client who relocated to Alaska. After doing this for so many years, where you live really is not the complicated part.
Sometimes our first meeting is by video and that is the only way we ever meet. We arrange for the keys, get into the property, see what we have and go from there.
First, we figure out what the house needs
No two properties arrive in exactly the same condition.
We may walk into a beautifully maintained home that is ready for photos. We may get a property after the tenants have moved out. It may have been vacant for a while. We may be helping adult children sell the home where their parents or grandparents lived for decades.
Whatever is there, we deal with what is actually in front of us.
If the home needs cleaning, repairs or other preparation before it goes on the market, we help coordinate it. We can meet vendors, facilitate access and make sure things get done. Once the property is ready, we handle the listing, photography, marketing, showings, offers, negotiations, inspections, appraisal, title and closing.
The important distinction is that we are doing these things as part of representing you in the sale of the property.
We are not trying to become your property manager. We are trying to get your house sold.
Some sales have more moving parts
A good portion of the long distance sales we handle involve more than simply an owner who moved away.
We work with inherited properties, estates, probate and guardianship sales. We are very comfortable working with attorneys, personal representatives, guardians, title companies and family members when legal matters are part of the transaction.
That experience matters before the property is listed, but it can matter just as much once we have a buyer.
Probate or another legal process can sound complicated to a buyer or an agent who does not deal with it regularly. Our job is to understand what is actually happening, communicate it clearly and keep something manageable from suddenly becoming a problem simply because someone does not understand it.
After many years of doing these transactions, we know when something needs attention and when something simply needs to be explained correctly.
This is more common than people realize
Recently, we sold a grandparents' home in Embassy Lakes in Cooper City while the seller lived in New York. We sold another Cooper City home while the owners were more than 6,000 miles away in France. We handled a Davie sale for owners who had moved to Colorado, and another Cooper City seller trusted us to handle her property while she lived in Virginia.
There are many, many more. Some sellers leave us a pristine house and a set of keys, others leave us a house full of history and quite a bit to figure out. Both are perfectly okay.
We sell homes throughout South Florida, including Broward, Miami Dade and Palm Beach counties, and we have handled long distance sales in Cooper City, Davie, Weston, Pembroke Pines, South Miami, Boca Raton and communities throughout the area.
What matters to me is not where you are. It is that we are here.
You should know everything without having to handle everything
That is probably the best way I can explain how we approach long distance seller representation.
You should know what is happening with your home. You should understand your options. You should be involved in the decisions that actually require you.
But every small thing that happens at the property does not need to become your project.
If someone needs access, we can deal with access. If something comes up during an inspection, we find out what is actually going on before everybody gets excited about it. If an attorney or title company needs something related to the transaction, we know how to work with them. If the buyer's agent has questions, we handle those too.
You hired us to represent you here, and representing a seller means doing a lot more than putting a sign in the yard and waiting for an offer.
For our long distance sellers, it means being the people on the ground who know the property, know the transaction and have your back all the way to closing.
You can be five miles away or 5,000 miles away. We know what to do from here.