Exactly what happens, in the order it happens. No mystery about what you're paying for, what I need from you, or why the timing is what it is.
We start here because everything downstream depends on it. Not with a number I feel good about — with a comparative market analysis built on rules, so you can see the reasoning rather than take my word for it.
I pull recent sales that are genuinely comparable to yours — not simply nearby. The filters I start with:
Six months keeps us in the current market rather than last year's. A quarter mile keeps us in your market — in Chicago, conditions change block to block, and a sale a mile away can be a different world. Similar size and room count keeps us comparing the same product.
If that returns too few sales to be meaningful, we expand deliberately — first the radius, then the time window — and I'll tell you when we've done it, because a comp set that's been stretched is weaker evidence and you should know that.
From there we work two ways: price per square foot where the properties are similar enough for it to mean something, and straight compare-and-contrast where they aren't — this one has parking and yours doesn't, that one was renovated and yours is original.
This is the part that feels backwards until you see the mechanism, so let me lay it out plainly.
Buyers search in round numbers. A home at $705,000 is invisible to everyone who capped their search at $700,000, and that's a large group. Pricing just under a threshold puts you in front of both sets of buyers instead of one.
More eyes means more showings. More showings means more offers. And here's the part that matters: the goal isn't to get one great offer. It's to get several offers close together.
Starting high and negotiating down produces the reverse: fewer buyers, no competition, a listing that ages, and a sale price set by whoever is still paying attention in month three.
We go through the property together and I tell you what's worth doing — which mostly means telling you what isn't.
Most sellers over-invest here. The instinct is to renovate; the math usually says otherwise. Buyers don't reimburse you for a new kitchen — they compare your home to the one down the street and discount for what bothers them.
I'd rather tell you to skip something than watch you spend $20,000 to recover $8,000. The goal is the highest net, not the most improved house.
For nearly every buyer, the photos are the property until they walk in. This is where the first-week audience is won or lost.
Showcase is a premium listing treatment on Zillow — an interactive floor plan, a 3D virtual tour, and elevated placement in search results. Zillow reports that fewer than 1% of listings on the platform carry it.
Zillow publishes performance figures for Showcase listings compared with similar non-Showcase listings:
The single biggest lever after price. The goal is putting as many buyers through the property as possible inside three days, because that's what creates competition.
The timing is chosen, not habitual. Going live Monday burns the listing's novelty midweek, when almost nobody can tour. Going live Friday gives buyers and their agents no time to arrange anything. Wednesday night or Thursday morning is the window where a listing is fresh, discoverable, and schedulable all at once.
It's not only my read. Redfin has studied listing day across their national data and found the same pattern: homes listed on Wednesday sold for about $2,000 more on average than those listed Sunday — roughly half a percent better against list price — while Thursday listings sold about five days faster. Sunday was the worst day on every measure they looked at.
Their explanation matches what I see on the ground: serious buyers plan their weekend touring late in the workweek. A listing that appears while those plans are being made gets into them. A listing that appears after doesn't.
We can post to the private agent network ahead of launch to build anticipation, and there are cases where that's useful.
What I don't recommend is showing during that window — and the reason is a trap I've watched sellers fall into. Someone tours early and makes a decent offer while you're still a week from going live. Now you're stuck with a genuinely bad choice: accept it and never find out whether the open house weekend would have produced better, or decline it and risk that buyer walking with nothing to replace them.
There's no good answer to that question once you're in it. So we don't create it. Build the anticipation, then let everyone in at once.
This is the piece most sellers have never had explained, and it matters more than it sounds.
When your listing goes live on the MLS, it doesn't sit there. It pushes automatically to the major consumer sites — Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, and others — along with the websites of essentially every brokerage in the region. One entry, distributed everywhere buyers actually look.
Which means the MLS data has to be right on day one. Square footage, taxes, assessments, parking, room dimensions — those fields travel to every site simultaneously, and a correction later doesn't reliably propagate. Errors here quietly cost showings from buyers who filtered you out.
Through eXp's luxury division there are additional placements available beyond standard syndication — a set of international and luxury-focused outlets that most listings never reach. Whether those are worth using depends on the property; for higher-priced homes they can meaningfully widen the buyer pool.
Two things that sound like logistics and are actually where listings are won or quietly lost.
Give me the days and times that work — and the ones that don't — and I'll build around them. Pets, small children, a work-from-home setup, a tenant: all workable with notice.
The honest tradeoff is that every restriction removes some buyers. A property that shows only on weekend afternoons will see fewer people than one that shows broadly. I'm not going to push you past what your life allows, but I'll tell you what a given limit costs so you're choosing it rather than absorbing it.
This is the least glamorous thing on this page and I'd argue it's the most important.
Buyer interest has a short half-life. An agent calls about a showing, or a question comes in about parking or assessments, or an offer arrives with a deadline. The response time on those determines whether momentum builds or evaporates. Deals are lost to unreturned calls far more often than to price.
Feedback gets relayed honestly, including when it's unflattering. Three buyers saying the same thing about your kitchen is information worth having, even when it isn't what you want to hear. That's how we know whether to adjust the price, the presentation, or nothing at all.
When offers arrive we go through each one together in full — not just the number. Price is one variable among several, and the highest offer is frequently not the best one.
I'll give you my read and my reasoning on each. The decision is always yours, and you'll have what you need to make it rather than a recommendation to trust.
Once we accept, we go through every detail of what happens next and I answer whatever you want to ask — as many times as you want to ask it.
From there the transaction has its own arc: attorney review, inspection, appraisal, title, and closing. That's covered end to end in the companion guide, including the parts where deals actually break and how we avoid them.
Short list, and front-loading it makes everything after it easier.
A listing agreement, and the Illinois disclosure forms — the main disclosure report, the radon disclosure, and a lead-based paint disclosure if the building predates 1978. I'll walk you through what each one is actually asking.
Disclose more than feels necessary. A disclosed and repaired issue is a conversation; an undisclosed known one is a lawsuit after closing, and Illinois lets a buyer recover costs and fees.
Request a current statement. It's higher than your balance because it includes interest through closing, and it's the biggest input into what you actually net.
Declaration, budget, recent meeting minutes. Your attorney handles the formal package later, but having these up front means nothing in it surprises us at the worst moment.
Fully cleaned, decluttered, personal items away, all bulbs working, cars off the driveway. Photo day is the single highest-leverage hour in the whole process.
Whether you're buying next, whether you can be flexible on the closing date, whether the place can be empty for showings. These shape strategy more than most sellers expect.
The pricing method, the launch timing, the three-day compression, the decision not to show during a coming-soon window — each one exists because of what it does to the number at the end. You should be able to ask me why about any of it and get a real answer.
If anything here raises a question, ask it now rather than in week three. That's the entire point of putting it in writing.
Also worth reading before you list:
The Chicago Seller’s Roadmap →