Residential Brokerages Editing and Proofreading Services

Three agents value the same house. Two say four hundred and twenty-five thousand and one says four hundred and seventy-five. The seller instructs the third, the house sits for five months, and it eventually sells for four hundred and eighteen — less than the honest agents suggested, after two price reductions that told every buyer something was wrong with it. The overvaluation was not a mistake. It was a way of winning the instruction.

We edit what residential agents and brokerages produce — market appraisal and valuation letters to sellers, pricing and evidence documentation, listing and instruction proposals, price reduction and strategy correspondence, viewing feedback and buyer interest reporting, offer presentation and negotiation correspondence, vendor progress and chain reporting, terms of business and fee documentation, marketing proposals and their commitments, and buyer registration and qualification material. Our editors work on the letter that tells a seller what their house is worth.

The market appraisal letter is where an agency either earns a relationship or buys an instruction it will regret, and its failure is a figure without the evidence and without the consequence of getting it wrong. Sellers are not choosing between agents; they are choosing between numbers, and the only defence against that is showing the working. We work through these so the figure is supported by named comparable properties with what they achieved and how they differ, since a seller who can see three real sales can distinguish a valuation from a bid for the instruction; so the difference between the asking price and the likely achieved price is stated explicitly, because these are two different numbers and conflating them is the mechanism of the whole problem; so the consequence of overpricing is described concretely — the weeks of no viewings, the reduction that signals a problem, the eventual price below where an honest start would have landed; so the pricing strategy is presented as a choice with what each option is likely to produce in time and in money; so anything about the property that will limit the price is named, given that a seller who hears it from you rather than from the third buyer trusts you; so the fee and any tie-in is stated in the same letter as the valuation, as separating them is how sellers are surprised; and so the letter says what would change the advice. Letters written this way lose some instructions and keep the sellers worth having.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client information, valuations and correspondence. We are editors rather than agents or valuers, and we offer no view on values, pricing strategy or market conditions. What we can do is make the number show its evidence.