Sell Your Colorado Home

The 2024 commission change and what nobody told you

In Colorado, a seller was never actually required to pay the buyer's agent. It was always negotiable — it simply became standard practice, buried in the listing where nobody looked at it. The 2024 changes did not rewrite that rule. They dragged it into the open and put it in writing.

So now buyer-agent compensation gets discussed and negotiated up front, on both sides. A seller can offer it, offer part of it, or decline to offer it — and each of those choices changes the pool of buyers who show up and the offers they write. Most sellers still do not know this. Most listing agents are not in a hurry to explain it, because the old way was simpler for them. I would rather you understand the lever, because how you pull it moves your net more than almost anything else on the sheet.

Why a stale listing costs more than a low list price

A house priced above the market does not sit quietly and wait for the right buyer. It sits loudly. The first two weekends pass with no offers, the days-on-market counter climbs, and every buyer watching now assumes something is wrong with it. By the time the price cuts start, the listing has already told the market it is overpriced — and the eventual sale comes in below what the right number would have brought on day one.

A house priced to clear does the opposite. It draws its offers early, often more than one at a time, and competing offers are the only thing that ever pushes a price above asking. Pricing high to leave room to negotiate is a strategy from a market that no longer exists. Today it produces a stale listing and a lower final number, every time.

What actually returns on prep, and what does not

The prep that returns is almost always the cheap, cosmetic, first-impression work: fresh neutral paint, updated light fixtures, clean landscaping, decluttering, a deep clean, and getting the small kitchen and bath details right. That work pays for itself because it changes how a buyer feels in the first ten seconds.

The prep that does not return is the big remodel. Gutting a kitchen or adding a bathroom right before a sale almost never earns back its cost, and it delays the listing on top of that. Before we spend a dollar, I run the pre-listing inspection so we fix what a buyer's inspector would flag — not what a designer would — and I will tell you plainly when the right answer is to do nothing and list as-is.

The seam between selling and buying

Most transactions do not break in the middle of the sale or the middle of the purchase. They break in the seam between them — the gap where the sale is handled by one company and the next purchase by another, on different timelines, with nobody accountable for how they line up.

That is how a seller ends up carrying two payments, or living in a rental for six weeks, or losing the house they wanted because their offer was contingent on a sale that had not closed. None of that is a market problem. It is a coordination problem, and it disappears when one licensee owns both ends of it.

Your buyer is getting a loan, and nobody on your side is watching it

Here is the sharpest version of the argument. When your buyer's offer comes in and the inspection turns something up, the negotiation that follows depends on what the buyer's loan can actually absorb — how much of a credit works as a rate buydown, whether a price reduction breaks their approval, what the appraisal will bear.

A listing agent cannot read the buyer's file. I can. Because I underwrite loans, I know what a given concession structure does to a buyer's numbers, which means I can protect your price with structure instead of guesswork. That is a lever most sellers never know they had, because the person representing them was never able to see it.

When selling is right

Selling is the right move for a relocation, a genuine downsize, a divorce where both parties want a clean break, an inherited home you do not need, or any life change where keeping the house no longer fits. If the only goal is cash and you love the home, there are ways to get at its value without selling, and I will be straight with you about that rather than talk you into a listing — see the equity calculator to run those numbers first.

How I work

I hold the mortgage license and the real estate license, and I serve Colorado statewide from my base in Edwards. That means your sale, the financing on your next home, and the coverage that has to be in force before you sign are the same conversation, on the same timeline, in front of the same person.

My realtor partners across the state handle the local showings and footwork, so you get full local coverage in your market and a single point of contact who owns the whole file. From the first conversation to signing day, nothing gets handed off and dropped.