Sell the big house on your terms. Create the lifestyle you want next.

People rarely call me because they want a different building. They call because something in their life has changed, or is about to, and the house they are in no longer fits it.

The gardens that were a joy for twenty years are now a job that takes every Saturday. The stairs have started to matter. The children live somewhere else and the four bedrooms are mostly closed doors. Or the money that is sitting in the walls would be more useful somewhere it can actually be spent.

The first conversation I have with anyone is therefore not about square footage. It is about what you want the next part of your life to look like. The house follows from the answer, which is the right order and almost nobody uses it.

Before real estate I spent twenty-seven years at State Street and almost six at Citizens, as a vice president running strategy and global project management.

What that gives you is not a story to tell at a listing appointment. It is the habit of getting a complicated thing with a lot of moving parts and a real deadline to land on time, and the willingness to give a client an answer they did not want to hear because it is the true one. A home sale has a dozen dependencies and one date that matters. That is the work I did for three decades.

It also means I am comfortable with numbers and will not hand you a valuation without the reasoning attached.

It has a name because it is a method rather than a manner, and naming it makes it something you can hold me to.

We begin with the life you want next, not the house. Then we work out what that life costs and where it can be had, which sometimes turns out to be a town nobody in the conversation had considered. Then, and only then, we look at what your current house is worth and how the two ends of the move fit together on a calendar.

Done in that order, the move stops being a loss you are managing and becomes a decision you are making. Done in the usual order, people sell a house, panic, and buy the first thing that is available.

If you are thinking about selling, the useful first step is knowing what your home is genuinely worth, in writing, with the reasoning attached. That costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and a surprising number of people make a decision purely because they finally had a real number instead of a guess.

If you are buying, particularly near the water, the useful first step is a conversation about how you want to live before anyone shows you a house. The list of features almost always changes afterward.

Anyone somewhere in between, which is most people, can start with a conversation and no agenda. Plenty of them end with me saying this is not the year. That is a perfectly good outcome.