The open
Two careers taught me not to wait. Then I joined one that’s built on waiting.
Marine Corps first. Then the Utah Army National Guard, and two deployments to Iraq. Running alongside most of those Guard years, twenty as a corrections officer for Salt Lake County.
Different work, same lesson, and it gets taught early: the person waiting for something to happen is the person it happens to. You learn to move first. You learn that the quiet stretch isn’t time off — it’s the part you actually control, and it’s where the outcome gets decided.
Then I got my real estate license, and found an industry that mostly waits. The standard play is to sign the listing agreement, put a sign in the yard, enter it on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and wait for another agent to bring you a buyer. There’s a word for that in this business. It’s called farming — you plant it, and then you wait on weather.
I want to be fair about it, because it isn’t laziness and it doesn’t make someone a bad agent. When the market is selling itself, farming works. Houses move, the sign does its job, and everybody involved looks good doing very little.
But nobody I worked with in either of those first two careers would have called it a plan. A plan is what you have for the days the weather doesn’t cooperate. So I work a listing the other way round: I go looking for the person who is going to buy your house, rather than waiting for another agent to bring them to me.
That’s the whole idea, and everything after this is the evidence for it — where I look for your buyer, what the marketing actually costs you, how the price gets decided, and what I will tell you when the answer isn’t the one you want.
Who you’re hiring
Every agent says they’re local. Here’s what I mean by it.
“Local expert” is on every agent’s business card, which means it tells you nothing. The useful version of that claim is specific, and it comes with an admission attached: there are places I know better than anyone you could hire, and places where somebody else has the edge.
Find where your house is. I’ll tell you which one you’re in.
Where’s the property?
Pick your area and I’ll tell you honestly how well I know it — including when the answer isn’t flattering to me.
The credentials behind that: licensed with Sun Key Realty, and certified as a Military Relocation Professional (MRP). The certification matters less than the reason I went and got it — a large share of the people buying and selling out here are moving on orders, and I’ve done that myself more than once.
None of which is worth much on its own. What it buys you is the next section, which is the part that’s actually checkable: what your market is doing right now, and how I know.
Your market, not the state’s
Here’s what Tooele County is actually doing.
Every agent will tell you the market is strong, or shifting, or whatever fits the conversation. Numbers don’t care what fits. Each of these carries where it came from and when I pulled it, so you can check any of them — and so can the next agent you talk to.
Median sale price
$485,000
The middle of the market — half of what sold went for more than this, half for less. It is where a buyer's expectations start.
Source: Wasatch Front Regional MLS — 622 single-family sales, six months to 13 Aug 2026
Median days on market
52
Half of the homes here sold within 52 days. That number is the honest yardstick for every promise you'll hear about a fast sale.
Source: Wasatch Front Regional MLS — six months to 13 Aug 2026
Sale price to list price
To pull
What sellers actually got against what they asked. The gap between those two is the price of guessing.
Needs: MLS — close price ÷ original list price, same six-month window
Listings that cut their price
To pull
The share of homes that came out too high and had to come down. This is the single best argument against reaching.
Needs: MLS — listings with one or more price reductions
Months of supply
To pull
How long it would take to sell every home currently listed at the current pace. Under about six months favours you; above it favours the buyer.
Needs: MLS — active listings ÷ average monthly closed sales
The one worth sitting with is days on market. Fifty-two days is the middle — not the slow end, the middle. Half the homes that sold took longer than that, and every one of their owners spent the back half of it wondering what went wrong.
Almost none of that is about the house. It’s about the price it launched at, and how quickly somebody was willing to tell the truth about it. That’s the next section.
The number
Move the price. Watch what I’m willing to do.
Most agents will show you a number. This shows you my rules, which is the more useful thing, because rules are something you can hold me to. Drag the price and the panel tells you exactly what I’d do at it — including the point where I’d turn the listing down.
Your CMA range
A Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) is the range recent sales actually support. These two are an example, not a valuation of anything — put your own in, or I’ll fill them in with you when we meet.
$485,000
These numbers stay on your device. Nothing here is sent anywhere, and I don’t see what you type.
At or below the midpoint
This is the part of the range the sales actually support. No price-improvement schedule needed — I'll take this listing on a handshake and the standard paperwork.
The first two weeks are the most traffic your listing will ever get — every buyer with a saved search is alerted the day it goes live, and that audience does not come back. A price cut on day 45 reaches a fraction of the people the right price would have reached on day one.
Which is why the number matters less than the plan attached to it — and why the next section is about the work that goes in during those two weeks.
The marketing
Your buyer is in Salt Lake County. I spent twenty years driving there.
Most of the people who buy houses out here are coming from the other side of the point of the mountain, priced out of where they are now. That’s what I’ve seen doing this — not a statistic I looked up — and I’ll tell you plainly it’s an observation rather than a number somebody published, because I’d rather you know the difference.
It also happens to be a road I drove for twenty years, to a job in Salt Lake County. Your buyer is somebody I was, on that commute, for two decades. So when the marketing points east instead of at the end of your street, that’s why.
Day one
I go and find the agents who already have your buyer.
Every home that sold near you had a buyer, and that buyer had an agent. That agent has more buyers in the same price band right now — the people who lost out, the ones still looking, the ones who called last week. They are the closest thing to a proven buyer that exists, and they are already sitting in somebody’s phone.
So the first thing I do is pull every one of those agents out of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and call them about your house. Not a blast email — a list, worked through.
Set the price above and this is the exact search I run. If you moved the slider in the last section, it’s already using your number.
The search, on the day we list
- Status
- Closed and under contract
- Price band
- $450,000 – $500,000
- Area
- Tooele County
- Window
- Last six months
- What I take from it
- The buyer's agent on every one
The band comes from where buyers actually cap their searches, so it’s the bracket your house competes in rather than a range I made up. Same rule the pricing section runs on.
And you get the list
You see every name, and when I called them.
You get the list on paper: the comparable sales, the agent on each one, and a column for the date I made contact. It comes back updated at every checkpoint, alongside the activity report.
Which means you don’t have to take “I’m marketing your home” on faith from me or from anyone else. You can look at what I did and when I did it, and ask me why if the answer is nothing.
Everything else, honestly
The rest of it, including what I don’t have yet.
A professional shoots it, and I'm standing there when they do
I don't photograph houses myself — I hire somebody who does it properly. What I don't do is hand over a lockbox code and read the results later. Somebody has to say which room leads, which angle flatters a space that doesn't deserve it, and what to leave out. That's the person who has walked the house, and on your listing that's me.
The MLS, done properly
Not a differentiator — every agent does this, and any of them who tells you otherwise is selling. What varies is whether the description and the photos are worth the traffic they get, and that part I take seriously.
Other agents share my listings
This happens and it helps, and I'm not going to dress it up as a network. It's colleagues doing each other a good turn, and it works better when I've done it for them first.
My own social channels, and I talk to everybody
Real, and modest. I'd rather tell you it's modest than imply a following I don't have. The people it reaches are local, which for the right house is exactly who you want.
A buyer list that's still small
I run a free buyers' guide, and people signing up for it are the beginning of a list I can tell about your house before it's public. It's genuinely early. When it's big enough to matter I'll say so, and not before.
What I don't have: a magic database
Some agents will show you a number of "buyers in our system." Ask them what's in it. Usually it's an email list nobody has spoken to in two years, and it will not sell your house.
None of it costs you anything on top of the commission. There is no marketing package, no premium placement, no menu of upgrades. If I can’t make your house worth buying at the price we agreed, charging you extra to try harder would be a strange way to fix that.
The first two weeks are the most attention your house will ever get. Everything above is about spending them deliberately instead of waiting to see what happens — which is what the next section lays out, week by week.
What actually happens
You should never have to call and ask what’s going on with your own house.
Every stage below has a date and something you receive. Tap through it — and hold me to it, because that’s what it’s for.
The timeline
The week before
Before it goes anywhere
We build the Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) together and you pick the number with the trade-offs in front of you. If we're listing above the midpoint, the Price Improvement Schedule gets signed now — while nobody is frustrated — rather than argued about in eight weeks. Then the photographer comes, and I'm there for it: photos, drone, and the tour, shot by somebody who does it for a living with me telling them what matters about your house.
What you get
The CMA, the three pricing scenarios, and the signed schedule if we're reaching.
1 of 8
Notice how much of that is me handing you something on a date we’ve already agreed. That’s deliberate. An agent who only calls with good news is an agent you learn nothing from, and the silence in the middle of a listing is where most of the frustration lives.
Which brings up the part everyone is waiting for me to skate past — what all of this costs. That’s next, and I’d rather raise it than have you ask.
Before you have to ask
What I charge, and the part most agents leave until you ask.
I’d rather raise this than have you sit through everything else wondering when I’m going to. So: my listing fee is 3% of the sale price. The Utah listing-side average is 2.98%, so that’s the market rather than a premium, and I’m not going to pretend it’s a discount.
That 3% is the listing side only. What, if anything, the buyer’s agent gets is a separate decision, and since the 2024 industry settlement it is genuinely yours to make rather than something that happens automatically. It’s the part most sellers don’t know they control, so I’d rather walk you through it in person than leave you with a number and no context.
Whether that number is fair
You should be able to check me on this, so here’s where it comes from.
2.98%
The Utah listing-side average — slightly above the national 2.88%. My 3% is the going rate here, not a premium.
Clever, survey of 533 agents, February 2026 (opens in a new tab)
0.3 points
How far commissions have drifted in twenty-five years. 3% was still the most common rate in 2022.
Federal Reserve FEDS Note, CoreLogic MLS data 1995–2023 (opens in a new tab)
0.1 points
How much the 2024 settlement actually moved total commissions — 5.8% to 5.7%. The collapse people assume happened, didn't.
Offerpad analysis of post-settlement rates, 2026 (opens in a new tab)
Here’s what I won’t tell you: that paying me more gets you a higher price. There’s no research showing that, and any agent who claims it is guessing at you.
The best-known study on this compared discount listings to full-service ones and found no difference in sale price (opens in a new tab). I’d rather hand you that than have you find it later and wonder what else I left out. What the fee buys is the work, and somebody willing to tell you the price is wrong while it’s still cheap to fix.
Now the part that actually decides what you walk away with.
Set a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) range in the pricing section and this will show you the comparison directly: what two scheduled price improvements cost, against what my fee costs. Being wrong on price is almost always the bigger number.
Which is the whole reason I’d rather argue with you about the price today than about my fee. Negotiating me down a percent is worth a fraction of what getting the number right is worth, and I’m the only one of us who has to say that out loud.
One more thing before we move on: nothing I’ve charged you here happens unless the house sells. No marketing fee, no photography invoice, no upfront anything. If it doesn’t sell, I’ve worked for nothing — which is the arrangement, and it’s why I care so much about the number we start at.
If you wore one of these
This isn’t a niche I picked. It’s just my life.
Plenty of agents advertise that they work with veterans and first responders. Some of them have a certificate. I have twenty-seven years in uniform and twenty more as a corrections officer, and the reason I work with these clients is that they’re the people I already knew.
That said, I’m not going to claim I understand every job on this list. Pick yours and I’ll tell you exactly how much standing I actually have.
Which one are you?
I've done this one
Active duty or Guard
Twenty-seven years, Marine Corps then the Utah Army National Guard, and two deployments to Iraq. So I know a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) window is not a plan — it's a date that moves, and it moves after you've already told everyone. If you end up selling this house from somewhere else, that's a normal Tuesday for me rather than a complication I'll be learning on your listing.
And if the offer on your house is a VA one.
This part matters even if none of the above is you. Some sellers get a Veterans Affairs (VA) offer and quietly rank it below a conventional one at the same price, on the strength of something they half-heard. Sometimes that’s right. Often it costs them money.
One example of the sort of thing that gets misread: a seller can pay a VA buyer’s ordinary closing costs with no cap — the 4% limit people cite applies only to extras on top, like prepaid taxes or paying off the buyer’s debts. So a VA concession request often looks more expensive than it is.
I’m not going to tell you a VA offer is automatically the best one on your table — that depends on the offer. What I’ll tell you is what’s actually true about it, which is harder to find than it should be, and I won’t let you throw one away over a rumour.
Ask me the hard ones
The questions where the honest answer isn’t the one I’d prefer to give.
Every agent invites questions at the end and hopes you don’t have any. These are the ones worth asking — of me, and of whoever else you’re talking to. Ask them the same ones and compare what you get back.
The first question most sellers ask
How many homes have you actually sold?
24
It would be a bigger number if I took every listing I was offered. I don’t, and you’ve already seen the standard I use — more than three percent above what the sales support, a reach with no written plan to stop reaching, or a house that won’t be made ready to show, and I’ll tell somebody I’m not their agent. I’ve said that out loud in somebody’s living room, and I’ll say it again.
Here’s what that’s worth to you. An agent who takes everything has a yard full of signs and a drawer full of listings that never sold, and from the outside you can’t tell those apart. When I agree to sell your house, I’m telling you I believe it sells at the number we set. That’s a different promise, and it’s the only one I can make honestly.
Maybe not. Ask them the same thing you should ask me: which sales is that number built on? A price with comparable sales behind it is a valuation. A price with nothing behind it is a bid for your listing, and you'll pay for it later in price cuts. Get both of our numbers with the evidence attached and compare those, not the numbers.
If we're on a Price Improvement Schedule and you decline a scheduled improvement, either of us can end the listing agreement without penalty within ten days of that checkpoint. That's written into the form before we start, deliberately, so that neither of us is trapped with the other. You'd still owe any costs the listing agreement specifies, and I'd tell you what those are before you sign rather than after.
Yes, and I'd rather you knew how before you needed to. The schedule above gives you a clean exit at every checkpoint. Outside those, come and talk to me — I have never held somebody to an agreement they'd stopped believing in, and a seller who wants out is not a seller I can do good work for anyway.
Usually no, and I'd rather give you a straight answer than a negotiation. What I'll do instead is show you the arithmetic in the commission section: getting the price wrong costs more than the fee, most of the time by a wide margin. If money is genuinely the obstacle, tell me that plainly and we'll talk about what changes — but I'm not going to open by cutting and then quietly do less work for it.
No. A buyer's repair requests are requests, and they're negotiated like everything else in the contract. Some are worth doing, some are worth a credit instead, and some are worth saying no to. What you should not do is agree to all of them because the list looked official — that list is one person's opinion written in a firm font.
This is the question that actually keeps people awake, and anyone who answers it quickly isn't listening. It turns on whether you could carry both payments for a stretch if you had to, and how much risk you can live with. I'll walk through it with you, and if the honest answer is that the timing doesn't work this year, I'd rather tell you that than list a house you can't afford to sell yet.
If you asked me something that isn’t here, that’s the one I most want to hear. The questions sellers apologise for asking are usually the ones that matter.
Your turn
I’ve done all the talking. One question back.
When you sell this house, which of these matters most? Not which sounds best — which one you’d protect if you could only keep one.
Whichever you pick, I’ll tell you what it changes about how I’d work your listing — because it changes nearly everything.
The next step is an hour at your kitchen table.
I’ll bring the Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) built on your address, the pricing scenarios with the trade-offs attached, and the list of agents I’d be calling about your house. You bring the questions I haven’t answered yet. If at the end of it you’d rather hire somebody else, I’ll shake your hand and mean it.
Not ready to meet? The valuation is the smaller ask and it costs you nothing. The buyer’s guide is there too, if you’re buying on the other end of this.
One last thing, and then I’ll stop
I should tell you why I actually do this, because it isn’t the commission and it isn’t the number of houses.
I like people. I used to host dinner parties at my house twice a month and I’m trying to get back to that. What I like about this job is that it puts me in rooms with people at the exact moment something big is happening to them — and if I do it properly, they’re still people I know afterwards.
That’s the whole reason I’d rather tell you the truth about your price than win your listing. Winning it gets me one transaction. Telling you the truth is how I end up sitting at your kitchen table again in ten years, when it’s the next house.