Ed Neuhaus 
Every Agent Is Going to Tell You They Are the Best
I’ve been on the other side of this conversation more times than I can count. A seller interviews three agents, and all three say roughly the same things. Great service. Top marketing. Competitive commissions. It all starts to blur together.
So lets skip the sales pitch and just walk through exactly what we do. How we price your home, how we market it, how we negotiate, and what you should actually expect from working with me. If it’s a fit, great. If not, at least you have a clear picture of what to compare against.
I’ll tell you upfront: this is a harder market to sell in than it was two years ago. Austin has roughly 12,800 active listings right now, the average home is sitting for 89 days, and buyers have options. That does not mean your home won’t sell. It means the agent you pick matters a lot more than it did when homes were getting 20 offers in 48 hours. In a market like this, execution is everything.
Pricing: This Is Where Most Listings Win or Lose
The most important decision you’ll make in this process is what price to list at. Get it right and you’ll sell in a reasonable timeframe with real money in your pocket. Get it wrong and you’ll spend months watching your home sit, slashing the price in increments, and eventually selling for less than you would have if you’d priced it correctly on day one.
I build your pricing recommendation from actual MLS data, not gut feelings or what the neighbor sold for two years ago. We look at active competition (what buyers are comparing your home to right now), pending sales (what the market is actually accepting), and closed sales (what has already transacted, ideally in the last 60-90 days). Then we talk about the adjustments.
Because adjustments matter in this corridor. A home with a Hill Country view in Bee Cave is not the same as an identical floorplan backing up to a commercial property. A home in the Eanes school district trades at a different premium than the same home across the LTISD line. These are the kinds of details that show up in the data when you know where to look.
The market right now is telling us something specific: buyers are accepting about 4% under list price on average, and $5,000 to $15,000 in seller concessions is common. If your agent is not building that into the strategy, you’re going to be surprised at the closing table. I’d rather tell you the honest number upfront and let you make an informed decision.
Want to understand the methodology in detail? I wrote out the full approach in our Austin home seller pricing strategy guide.
The Marketing Plan
A lot of agents will tell you they “do digital marketing.” What that usually means is they upload your home to the MLS and hope the algorithm does the rest. That’s not a marketing plan. That’s passive.
Here’s what we actually do.
Professional Photography
Every listing gets professional photography. Not iPhone photos touched up in Lightroom, not whatever the agent had handy that day. A professional photographer who does this for a living and knows how to make a Hill Country limestone exterior look like what it felt like when you bought it.
The data on this is not subtle. Listings with professional photography sell 32% faster. Price per square foot on homes with high-quality images runs 47% higher than comparable listings with amateur photos. Your photos are doing the first showing before any buyer ever walks through the door, and that showing happens about three seconds after they land on your listing.
Drone Aerial Video
For most properties in our market, drone is not optional. If you’re selling in Bee Cave, Lakeway, Westlake, or anywhere in the Hill Country, buyers want to see the terrain, the lot, the views, the proximity to the lake. A ground-level photo cannot tell that story.
Listings with drone photography sell 68% faster than listings without it. That’s not a number I invented. And when buyers can see an aerial view, they are 65% more likely to schedule an in-person showing. If your lot backs up to a greenbelt, has a pool, sits on a ridge line, or has any kind of feature that doesn’t show from street level, drone is how we show it.
Video Walkthrough
We produce a video walkthrough for every listing. Property listings with video get four times as many inquiries. For luxury and Hill Country properties, we also create a short-form social cut that goes beyond the listing to reach buyers who aren’t actively searching yet.
Targeted Digital Advertising
Your home gets in front of buyers beyond whoever happens to be browsing the MLS that day. We run targeted digital ads on platforms where buyers are spending time, with creative that’s specific to your property. Not a generic “homes for sale” ad. Your home, your features, your price point, to an audience selected for the right buyer profile.
We track what’s working and adjust. If the inquiry volume on a specific platform isn’t where it should be, we shift. This is a live campaign, not a set-it-and-forget-it situation.
The MLS and Syndication
Yes, your home goes on the MLS with accurate, complete data. I mention this not because it’s remarkable but because incomplete MLS data is a real problem — wrong square footage, missing features, wrong school district, no HOA disclosure. Sloppy data hurts your listing’s performance and creates issues later in the transaction. We get it right the first time.
We Actually Live Here
I’ve been selling homes in the Austin corridor for 16 years. My daughter goes to Lake Travis High School. I know the difference between a Rough Hollow lot with a lake view and a Rough Hollow lot that backs up to the spine road, because I’ve sold both. I know which subdivisions in Sweetwater have the views and which ones feel like you’re in someone’s backyard. I know the Eanes school boundaries well enough that I can tell you whether a specific address qualifies, because that question comes up in nearly every transaction over $1.5M in the 78746 zip code.
This matters when a buyer’s agent calls me at 9pm with a question about the HOA, the well, the septic, the easement on the back of the lot, or whether the seller would consider a leaseback. I know this market. I can answer those questions in real time, which keeps deals from falling apart over things that don’t need to be deal-breakers.
At Neuhaus Realty Group, we focus on West Austin and the Hill Country for a reason. It’s where we work best and where we add the most value.
Negotiation in a Buyer’s Market
This is honestly the part most agents gloss over. They’ll describe their marketing, show you the photos, talk about the MLS. And then they’ll tell you about their “negotiation skills” in about one sentence with no specifics.
So lets be specific about what negotiation actually looks like right now.
Buyers are asking for things in this market that they wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for in 2021. Repair credits. Rate buydowns. Extended option periods. Leaseback provisions. Early possession. Right now, a 2-3% seller concession toward closing costs is not unusual. A buyer asking for $10,000-$15,000 in repairs after an inspection is not unusual. How we handle those requests determines how much money ends up in your pocket.
My approach: I start from the position that the buyer wants your house. They made an offer. They are interested. That gives us leverage we don’t always use. Not every repair request is worth fighting over, and not every concession request is unreasonable — but they’re not all legitimate either. I go through every request on its merits, I push back on what is negotiable, and I advise you clearly on what is worth conceding versus what is worth holding firm on.
I’ve also been on the buyer’s side of thousands of transactions in this market. I know how buyer’s agents think and what they’re coached to ask for. That context is useful when we’re sitting across a negotiation from someone who’s just trying to see how much they can extract.
What Communication Actually Looks Like
I know this sounds like something every agent says. But I’ll be direct about what I actually mean, because “great communication” can mean a lot of different things.
While your home is listed, you’ll hear from me at least once a week with a real update. Not just “it’s still active.” Real information: showing feedback, market changes, comparable sales that have hit since we listed, anything that might affect our strategy. If we need to have a conversation about price, I’ll initiate it. I won’t wait for you to ask.
When an offer comes in, I’ll walk you through every term, not just the price. The financing contingency matters. The option period matters. The closing date matters. The earnest money matters. I’ll explain what each term means for you before you sign anything.
And when things get complicated (because in real estate, something almost always gets complicated), you’ll hear from me before you hear about it from someone else.
What Our Clients Say
I’ll be honest: the best thing I can tell you here is to go look at the reviews yourself. Not because I’m being modest but because a page someone wrote about themselves is less useful than what actual clients said in their own words.
What I hear most often, across dozens of transactions: people appreciated that I told them the truth early, even when the truth was not what they wanted to hear. That I didn’t overprice the listing to win the business and then push for reductions later. That I showed up when things got complicated. That after closing, they knew exactly how we got from the listing date to the closing table.
That’s what I’m going for. Not a five-star review because I said nice things. A client who genuinely felt like the outcome was the best possible result given the actual conditions of the market.
If you want to dig deeper, take a look at our guide for sellers whose homes didn’t sell with a previous agent. Reading that will tell you more about how I think about this process than anything else I could say here.
The Honest Case for Hiring a Strong Listing Agent
Top listing agents sell homes for about 9% more than the average agent. In practical terms, on a $750,000 home, that’s a $67,500 difference. The commission conversation is worth having, but it shouldn’t be the only conversation you’re having when you’re interviewing agents.
The question isn’t which agent is cheapest. The question is which agent is most likely to get you the best outcome in this market. Those are different questions and they have different answers.
I’m not going to tell you I’m the right fit for every seller. If you’re selling an entry-level condo in a market segment I don’t specialize in, I’m probably not your best option. But if you’re selling a home in Bee Cave, Lakeway, Westlake, Dripping Springs, or anywhere in the West Austin corridor, this is where I have worked for 16 years and where I know the market cold.
Browse some of the homes we currently have listed in Bee Cave, Lakeway, and Westlake if you want to see how we present properties.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to Have a Real Conversation?
No pressure, no obligation, no three-hour kitchen table presentation with a binder full of charts. A listing consultation with me is a conversation about your specific situation: your timeline, your home, the market conditions in your neighborhood, and what a realistic outcome looks like.
Before that meeting, you might find it useful to read through a few of our seller guides. Should you sell now or wait? What are the most common mistakes sellers make? What does staging actually accomplish in this market? The more informed you are going in, the more useful our time together will be.
When you’re ready, reach out to Ed Neuhaus directly to schedule a no-pressure listing consultation. We’ll look at the data together and you’ll leave with a clear picture of what your home is worth and what selling it would actually look like.
