If I Call a Realtor, Is There a Sign in My Yard by Friday?

There's a conversation that is sort of happening in a lot of Gainesville kitchens right now, and the strangest thing about it is that it isn't really happening at all.

Here's how it goes on one side of the table:

Read those again. Aren't they the same sentence said from two points of view?

Two people who love each other, eleven minutes apart, both convinced that making that one phone call starts a process that neither one is ready to undertake. So what happens? No one calls, and that “not-calling” goes on for a year, and sometimes two. I've experienced it in my own family.

The daughter isn't afraid of the phone call. She's afraid of what the phone call means about her — that she's the kind of person who's already measuring the place. She'd rather spend another eighteen months driving over on Tuesdays than have anyone, including herself, think she couldn't wait.

The mother isn't afraid of the phone call either. She's afraid of what happens after the phone call. She's watched this happen to friends: one conversation, and suddenly everyone has opinions about her stairs, and a brochure appears on her counter, and the whole thing takes on a momentum that has nothing to do with what she actually wants.

So they protect and love each other. Right into a corner.

And here's the thing that should make everybody a little bit annoyed: they might want the same thing. A lot of the time they do because she's tired of the yard, or maybe her spouse took care of it before he passed. She's been thinking about a place with a little patio and no upstairs, but saying so feels like an admission. Her daughter is braced for the argument that might not ever come.

You can't find that out without talking, and you can't talk if you both believe talking is the same thing as deciding.

Let me be as plain as I can be about how this actually works, because I think the confusion is costing people real money and real time.

Asking what your house is worth is not the same as listing your house.

There is no form. There is no agreement. There is no sign. There is not a version of this where you ask me a question and something starts happening to you. If you want a number, I'll get you a number. If you want to know what your taxes would look like on a smaller place here — which, by the way, is usually a much better answer than people expect, and I'll get to that in another post — I'll run it and hand you the page. You can put the page in a drawer. Seriously, that happens all the time.

The listing agreement is a separate thing, on a separate day, that you sign on purpose. It does not sneak up behind you. I'm all about communication. That is the most important part of my job.

If you've had a bad experience with this — one of those online “what's my home worth” forms that produced a number you didn't believe and then six weeks of calls from people you'd never met — I understand completely why your guard is up. That's not a real estate conversation, that's a lead form, and it's given the other one a seriously bad rep.

Here's a number that I think might help: AARP's 2024 survey found that 75% of adults over 50 want to stay in their current home as they age — and 44% expect to move anyway.

Let's think about that for a moment. Three quarters of people want to stay. Nearly half know they probably won't. That's not a contradiction and it's not a failure; it's just a very large number of people holding two true things at once, mostly by themselves, mostly in the wee hours when the dishes are done and the house is quiet.

If that's you — either chair — you are not behind and you are not the only one. You're right where you need to be at this moment; it's just that no one has said the quiet part loud just yet.

Only one thing.

If you're the daughter: ask the open question and then be quiet. If it were entirely up to you — nobody else voting — what would you want to do about the house? Don't bring a plan. Don't bring a brochure. Don't answer it for her. You may be surprised, and if you're not surprised, at least now you know what you're working with instead of guessing.

If you're the mother: if you have wondered what your home is worth, find out only for yourself, not for anyone else, and not because you've decided anything. You've made bigger decisions than this one with less information, and you shouldn't have to make this one in the dark just because asking feels like conceding something.

Nobody's putting anybody anywhere. It's your house and it's your call, and it should stay your call — which is a lot easier to manage when you have the actual numbers and two years to think about them than when you're deciding something enormous in a hallway on no sleep.

Ask me. That's all you need to do.

No sign, no list, no follow-up campaign. I'll get you what your house is worth and what the next one would actually cost you every month, taxes and insurance included, and then you can do absolutely nothing with it for as long as you like. You can call me two years from now and I'll remember this conversation.

I've lived in Gainesville since 1972. My friends are here and my kids are still here. I'm not going anywhere.