Calgary REALTOR® Diane Richardson

Real estate guidance for Calgary and surrounding-area buyers and sellers, with clear communication, practical advice and considerably less salesmanship than you may be expecting.

There is something slightly peculiar about choosing a REALTOR®. You are often expected to choose the person who will help you make one of your largest financial decisions after reading a biography full of words such as passionate, dedicated and committed to excellence.

Those words are easy to write. What matters is what happens when there is a difficult decision to make, an inspection reveals something unexpected, an offer arrives with awkward terms or the market is telling us something neither buyer nor seller particularly wants to hear.

Diane Richardson is a REALTOR® with CIR Realty working with buyers and sellers in Calgary and surrounding communities. The approach is straightforward: understand what you are trying to accomplish, identify the decisions that actually matter and then use market information and property-specific details to help you work through them.

You do not need another person manufacturing urgency. Real estate already contains enough urgency of its own.

Sometimes the useful advice is to move quickly. Sometimes it is to investigate further. And sometimes the most valuable advice is simply: this property may not make sense for you.

• Buying a Home Focus the search around your budget, location, property requirements and the things that genuinely affect how you want to live.
• Selling a Property Consider pricing, presentation, competing listings and what will make the right buyers pay attention to your property.
• Making Decisions Compare the evidence, understand the trade-offs and avoid treating every real estate decision as though there is only one acceptable answer.

For Buyers: The Goal Is Not to Find More Homes

The internet has solved the problem of scarcity. Buyers no longer suffer from a shortage of listings. If anything, the problem is the opposite: too many photographs, too many saved properties and too many homes that technically meet the search criteria but make very little sense in real life.

A useful buying strategy reduces the noise.

A successful property search is not necessarily the one in which you view the most homes. It may be the one in which you become considerably better at recognizing which homes you do not need to see.

For Sellers: Attention Comes Before Action

A seller understandably wants the highest possible price. A buyer wants to believe the property is worth the price being asked. Marketing sits between those two positions.

Before somebody books a showing, they will probably see your home as a thumbnail photograph, a price and a few lines of information beside several competing properties. That makes selling partly a problem of perception.

The question is not simply, “How do we advertise the house?” It is: “How do we make it easier for the right buyer to understand why this property deserves their attention?”