Offers & negotiation
How Lisa manages inspection requests on her listings, so sellers don’t get bullied into repairs they could skip.
Before a single showing is scheduled, before a photographer steps through your front door, before the listing hits the MLS, there’s a set of decisions that will determine more about your final sale price than almost anything that comes after. Most sellers underestimate this phase. They treat it as logistics. We treat it as strategy.
In the Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire markets, buyers have options. They have access to every listing within seconds of it going live. They walk in comparing your home to three others they saw last Saturday. What makes them stop and write an offer, rather than bookmark it for later, or worse, note the price drop two weeks from now, is the quiet confidence of a home that has been genuinely prepared to be scrutinized.
Our job in this stage is to look at your home the way an objective buyer will, and to give you an honest read on what matters. Not every repair is worth doing. Not every upgrade moves the needle. We help you spend where it counts and hold back where it doesn't.
Every home we list begins with a walk-through that’s less about admiring the space and more about reading it honestly.
Most listings need two to four weeks of preparation before they're ready for market. Here's how we typically sequence it.
We visit the home, walk it room by room, discuss your goals and timeline, and begin the honest assessment. By the end of this visit, you'll have a clear picture of what needs to happen before we go to market and in what order.
While prep work begins, we run the comparable sales analysis and prepare our pricing recommendation. Pricing and preparation inform each other, we don't complete one without the other.
Contracted work happens. We check in, coordinate timing, and confirm the home is tracking toward shoot-ready. For sellers who are still living in the home, we work around your life, not the other way around.
Professional photography, floor plan if applicable, and any video content. We review everything before it's used. One bad photo can define how a listing is perceived. None go live without our approval.
The listing goes active with everything in place, not as a preview, not as a placeholder. The first day on market should be the best version of your home, everywhere, simultaneously.
These are the patterns we recognize immediately. Each one has a right answer, and a costly wrong one.
Nearly every seller asks whether to update the kitchen before listing. The honest answer depends on what "update" means, what the comparable sales show, and what price point you're in. A full renovation rarely returns dollar-for-dollar in the North Shore MA market. A deep clean, hardware refresh, and professionally staged presentation almost always does.
We'll tell you which is your situation, not what you want to hear, but what the data says.
The roof that has five years left. The HVAC that works but is fifteen years old. The water heater that passed its last inspection. Sellers often want to disclose nothing and hope the buyer doesn't ask. That’s a negotiating position that almost always backfires, because the buyer's inspector will find it, and they'll ask for more than the disclosure would have cost.
We help you get ahead of it, with honest disclosure language and a realistic read on what to repair versus what to price into the offer.
You love your furniture. You've lived with it for twenty years. But buyers shopping in Andover, Newburyport, or Windham NH are often looking at newer, more minimal aesthetics, and a home that looks dated on screen doesn't get scheduled for showings. Staging isn't about your taste. It's about removing barriers to the buyer's imagination.
We’ll walk through this honestly with you. We won’t tell you everything needs to go. We’ll tell you what’s getting in the way.
Tell us about the home, your timeline, and your goals. We'll walk you through what preparation actually looks like for your property, specific, honest, and without any obligation to list with us until you're ready.
Lisa Sevajian
lisa.sevajian@exprealty.com · 978-457-3406
Top 1.5% of over 1.4 million Realtors · Brokered by eXp Realty
Through every sale there are small negotiations, and there are huge negotiations. This one falls somewhere in the middle. Each one matters if your equity is on the line.
In Massachusetts, home sellers are being bullied into making repairs they probably could skip if they had a plan. Buyers can no longer waive their home inspection in their offer to win, so some are using inspection reports like a repair list that the sellers should be happy to get started on.
The time to think about what you’re going to say in a difficult conversation is before you have to have the difficult conversation. Practicing on clients means risking their money. I don’t do that.
Part of the LSG selling strategy is having a plan for when a hiccup happens, because a hiccup will happen. When the inspection response comes back with a long list, we already know which items are real, which are cosmetic, and which are the buyer testing to see if you’ll flinch. That’s how you protect your equity at the negotiation table.
Want a plan for protecting your equity on your sale?
Book a 15-minute call with Lisa