Your Home, Your Story, Your Next Chapter
This is my book on selling a South Coast or Cape Cod home for the best price and terms in the shortest time, and it is yours free as a PDF.
Why I wrote this
Have you read What to Expect When You're Expecting? It runs through the physical ins and outs, the emotional roller coaster, and who is on your team and what each of them is responsible for. Think of this book as What to Expect When You're Selling.
Selling a house you have lived in for twenty or thirty years is an emotional transaction before it is a financial one. Most of the sellers I work with on the South Coast and Cape Cod are not moving because something went wrong. They are moving because the house has become more property than they want to look after, because the gardens that were a pleasure for two decades are now a weekend of work every weekend, or because the next chapter looks better somewhere smaller. The money matters. It is rarely the first thing on the list.
What follows is the shape of the book. The full version goes further on every one of these, and it is free at the bottom of this page.
Get clear on why you are selling before you get clear on a price
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to put the house on the market. The decision has usually been turning over for a year or more, and there is almost always more than one reason behind it. For a couple selling together, there are often two sets of reasons that do not match.
This matters because a listing strategy is built on your goals, not on a template. A seller who needs to be across the country inside sixty days to care for a parent and a seller who is in no hurry and wants to capture every dollar should not get the same recommendation, even on two identical houses on the same street. One of them should clear out so the house can be occupied immediately. The other has room to invest in landscaping, to test the market at the top of the range, and to wait.
The first exercise in the book is therefore a writing exercise, and it happens before any agent walks through the door. Write down everything that matters to you about this sale, and after each one, write down why. If the number in your head is $650,000, ask where that figure came from. Is it what the neighbor got? Is it what pays off the mortgage and funds the next down payment? Is it what funds retirement? What you net matters more than what the listing says, and a house is worth what a buyer in this market will pay for it, which is not always the same as what you need.
Write down what you do not want, too. Hours you will not allow showings. Repairs you are not willing to make. The garage you are not willing to empty. Every restriction you place on a sale reduces the number of buyers who see the house, and that is a real cost. It can still be the right call. It should be a decision rather than an accident.
If you are selling as a couple, make two separate lists before you compare them. One partner is often reluctant to contradict the other in the room. Separate lists give each of you more room to be honest, and finding a disagreement now is far cheaper than finding it during negotiations.
How to interview a listing agent
Many sellers hire the first licensed person they know. Uncle Harvey may be a lovely man and still be the wrong agent for your house, and a family discount on the commission does not come close to covering what inexperience costs when a transaction starts coming apart. I have sat on both sides of enough deals to have watched most of the ways this goes wrong, and the expensive ones are almost never about the commission rate.
You would not choose a surgeon because he lends you his lawnmower. You would check credentials, whether he does this particular operation often, and what his patients say. Your house deserves the same scrutiny. Treat the listing appointment as an interview rather than a presentation, and ask questions the agent cannot answer from a slide.
The book lays out what to ask and what a good answer sounds like: how they arrived at the price and what in the data supports it, what they will spend on marketing and where it goes, who answers the phone when you call on a Sunday, how they handle an inspection that turns up something real, and what happens if the house sits. Ask for the last several sales and the ratio of sale price to original list price, which is a more honest measure than any single success story.
What marketing actually means now
The way people shop, read the news, and find anything at all has changed completely in twenty years, and a great deal of the real estate industry has not kept up. Most agents still market a house roughly the way it was marketed in the 1980s. That approach will often sell a house. It will not sell it as fast, or for as much, or on terms as favorable, because it reaches a far smaller number of qualified buyers.
You do not need to become technical. You need to know enough to tell whether the person across your kitchen table does. Plenty of agents will say they market on social media, and what they mean is that they will post the listing on their own pages, where it reaches the people who already follow them. That is not marketing on social media. Paid, targeted distribution that puts your house in front of people who have shown they are looking in your price range and your town is a different activity with different results.
The book covers what to look for: real video rather than a slideshow, photography that accounts for how a coastal house shows in different light, targeted advertising with numbers attached, and a plan for capturing the buyers who were already searching before your house existed as a listing. The National Association of REALTORS® puts a typical active buyer search at about ten weeks, and most buyers have been looking online well before that. The buyer for your house has probably been looking for months.
Negotiating is more than the number
Price is the part everyone watches, and it is one of a dozen levers. Closing timeline. Cash or financed. Repairs or as is. Which contingencies stay in and which come out. Deposit size. A rent back so you are not moving twice. Whether a backup offer is worth holding.
Any of those can be worth more to you than a few thousand dollars on the sale price, depending on what you wrote on that first list. A seller who needs time gains more from a sixty day close than from a higher number that forces a scramble. A seller funding a retirement account cares about the net. I hold the Real Estate Negotiation Expert designation, and the most useful thing it taught me is that the terms are where most of the room is.
Getting ready, and what to do once it is listed
The preparation chapter is the most practical part of the book, and it is the part that pays for itself. It goes room by room through what to repair, what to leave alone, what to pack up before the photographer arrives, and where a few hundred dollars returns several thousand. I am a Certified Home Stager, and the honest summary is that most houses need editing rather than renovation.
Once the house is on the market, a short list of habits makes every showing better. Turn on every light in the house before you leave in the morning. Open all the blinds and window treatments. Put away anything personal that came back out yesterday. Give the kitchen and both bathrooms a final wipe, fold the towels, empty the trash. Sweep the front step so nothing gets tracked through the house you are working to keep clean. Make a plan for the dog, because a buyer who loves your house may be frightened of him.
Then leave. Be out of the house during a showing. You want buyers to open the closets, run the disposal, pace off the dining room, and say out loud to their agent what they do and do not like. Your presence, however quietly you sit at your desk, stops all of that from happening.
What the NAR settlement changed for sellers
The rules around how agents are paid changed in 2024, and the practical effect for a seller is that nothing about compensation is assumed any more. What you pay your own agent is a negotiation, and whether you offer anything toward a buyer's agent is a separate decision with real consequences for how many buyers can afford to see your house.
The final chapter of the book walks through the change in plain language, what it means when you sit down to sign a listing agreement, and the questions to ask before you decide. It is a short chapter and worth reading before your first listing appointment rather than during it.
Read the whole book
The full book covers all of the above in more depth, along with communication, a seller timeline, and an appendix of sources you can check yourself.
Download the book as a PDF (5.7 MB). It is a gift, with my best wishes for the sale of your home. If something in it raises a question about your own house, call me at (508) 208-1927.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the book cost?
Nothing. It is a free PDF, and there is no obligation attached to it. I wrote it so that sellers on the South Coast and Cape Cod walk into a listing appointment already knowing what to ask.
Is it specific to Massachusetts?
The principles apply anywhere, and the examples, the market context, and the process are written for the South Coast and Cape Cod. I am licensed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and the book reflects how a sale works here rather than a national average.
Do I have to be ready to sell to read it?
No. Most of the sellers I work with were a year or more away from listing when we first spoke. The chapters on goals and preparation are the most useful ones to read early, because they are the parts that take time.
Who co-authored it?
Krista Mashore, a real estate coach and author. The South Coast and Cape Cod content, the market context, and the voice are mine.
Keep exploring
Ready to make your move with Susan Gorden Ryan?