Douglas Elliman Real Estate - Maralyn Diggin

Obviously it was not for free, as the price indicates, it was a fairly standard real estate commission but Angie only wants dollar figures and I'm not revealing the selling price of our house here. Now, we chose Allen Fox as our realtor and Allen is with Prudential Douglas Elliman in Plainview, NY. We spoke to about 20 realtors before we made our selection, from smiling fantasists promising an out-of-this world selling price to shady investors telling us how little the place was worth. Allen was not about spinning nonsense; he was about understanding what WE needed and not giving us the standard snow job that most realtors offered up. He partnered with us to make sure the house was ready to sell but also understanding that we needed to live in it until the very end -- but with a lot of business travel as well. So he volunteered to take care of basic maintenance, deal with our cantankerous red tag sale person, and get all our cable equipment back to provider since we might not be able to do that ourselves and did not want equipment charges hanging over us. These may sound like little things, but when you are not in town to deal with them yourself, a reliable realtor telling you, "Go do what you need. I'll take care of it." is priceless -- especially when he means it! Allen priced it appropriately and realistically, guided us through negotiating a final price and basically did whatever hand-holding we needed since we had never sold a house before. To make a long story short, he got us an offer in the first week it was listed. He kept us fully informed of goings on even though we both travel to difficult communication areas often. And within an amazingly short time, the deal was finalized, we went to contract, and we finally closed this week, just about 8 or 9 weeks after the initial listing and a price we were quite happy with.