The promise this guide makes.

Selling a home is one of the largest financial events of your life, and most of the advice written about it is designed to flatter you into a listing agreement. This guide is designed to do something different: show you how pricing and selling actually work in Genesee County, so that whoever you hire, you walk in knowing what good looks like.

A little about me, so you know whose advice you're reading. Real estate is my family's trade. My father, Grant Hamady, opened our firm in 1971, and the Hamady name has been on Genesee County closings for more than fifty years. Before I sold homes, I worked in financial services as an investment adviser, a mortgage banker, and a credit specialist. I read the money first, then the house.

Here is the promise, and it's the same one I make at every kitchen table: I will tell you what your home is actually worth, not the number that wins me the listing. Some agents buy listings with flattering prices and walk them down later. You'll see in these pages exactly what that strategy costs the seller, and why I won't use it.

Read it straight through or jump to what you need. When a question comes up that a guide can't answer, my direct line is on the back. When you call, I answer.

David HamadyHamadyRobinson, REALTORS® · License MI #6501274903

What your home is actually worth.

Your home is worth what a qualified buyer will pay for it in today's market, in your neighborhood, against today's competition. That's the whole definition. Everything else — what you paid, what you've put into it, what the house down the street asked, what an algorithm guessed — is context at best and noise at worst.

Your market is your neighborhood.

When people hear "Flint housing market," they picture the headlines, and plenty of sellers underprice because of them. The county tells a very different story than the city does, and your street tells a different story than either. A ZIP code, sometimes a single school district, moves differently than the regional average.

Pricing a home off a statewide story is how sellers leave money on the table, in both directions. Price off the regional headline in a strong pocket and you give away equity. Price off optimism in a soft one and you sit. The only cure is data at the neighborhood level.

That's why I subscribe to Altos Research, live market data most local agents don't carry. Before we set your price, I pull what's for sale, what's moving, and what buyers are actually paying, block by block, for your specific neighborhood, the week we list. Not last quarter's county average. Your street, now.

What I pull before we set your price

How we get to your number.

Pricing isn't a guess dressed up in a presentation. It's a method — the same one an appraiser will use on your buyer's loan later — applied honestly and shown to you step by step.

What overpricing actually costs.

"We can always come down" sounds harmless. It's the most expensive sentence in real estate. Here's the mechanism, so you can see why I won't price your home on hope.

The right price isn't modest. It's leverage.

What's worth doing before we list.

Before your home goes anywhere near the market, I'll walk it with you, room by room, and split everything into two lists: what earns its money back, and what doesn't. Most sellers over-invest in the wrong things and skip the cheap ones that matter. Here's the short version.

How buyers will find your home.

Marketing a home isn't a secret formula, no matter how many agents sell it as one. It's doing the visible things at a high standard, and the local things no portal can do. Here's exactly what happens when I list your home.

An offer is more than a price.

When offers arrive, the headline number gets all the attention. It shouldn't. Financing strength, deposit, contingencies, timeline, and concessions all change what you actually walk away with, and the highest offer is not always the one that gets you there.

From offer to closing table.

An accepted offer isn't a sale yet. The next thirty to forty-five days are where prepared sellers glide and unprepared ones bleed money. Here's what's coming and how we handle it.

The money, in the open.

Before you sign anything, we build your seller's net sheet together, line by line. It's the document most agents save for later, after you've committed. I'd rather you see it first, because a seller who knows their number negotiates better and sleeps better.

Your net sheet covers

On commissions: they are not set by law, and mine comes with the reasoning attached. If any number on that sheet isn't earning its place, ask me to defend it. I will, or it comes off.

One more thing worth saying plainly: the cheapest fee is not the same as the highest net. An agent who saves you one percent and costs you three in pricing and negotiation is expensive. Judge the whole number. I'll happily be judged on mine.