Karen George is the owner and broker of Walton George Realty Group, a brokerage that has served East Tennessee for three years. She built the firm around one idea about client service, and she puts it this way.
Anyone can sell a home. Anyone can buy a home. But working with us, we want to be like a concierge to our clients.
That’s a high bar to hold once the contract is signed and the questions start coming in. Walton George Realty Group partnered with HomeHandoff to give buyers and sellers one shared place for everything about the home, from the listing through the years after closing.
The questions buyers ask after closing
Karen’s agents hear the same kinds of questions on most deals, and plenty of them show up after the keys have changed hands.
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Where the manuals are for the appliances
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What the wall color is and where the paint came from
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What the neighborhood is like
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Which providers and contractors have worked on the home
Without a system, each one turns into a call or a text that travels from the buyer to the agent to the seller and back again. Karen wanted her team to have those answers ready before anyone had to ask.
We want to be able to answer all of their questions and make the process easier.
Home information buyers can’t find on listing sites
Buyers do a lot of their own research before they book a showing. Listing sites cover the price, the photos, and the square footage. What they can’t cover is everything the seller knows from living in the house.
Buyers believe they can find out everything on most of the software, like Zillow, Realtor.com, many different things. But this is going to give them information that they couldn’t possibly find on their own.
HomeHandoff captures that information from the seller, like how the home runs, who has serviced it, and where the manuals and warranties are. Buyers get it before they move in. Sellers get a way to show more of their home than a listing can, and Karen sees that transparency as part of what sets her listings apart.
It’s going to make our listings stand apart from any listings in the area.
What the HomeHandoff marketplace and mail forwarding did for buyers and sellers
Karen describes the early reaction from her buyers and sellers as amazing. Two features stood out to her.
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Buying and selling what stays with the home. Buyers and sellers can settle items like a couch or a bike directly in HomeHandoff, without the agents passing offers back and forth.
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Getting misdelivered mail back to the seller. When mail shows up for the previous owner, the buyer can get it to the seller without anyone sharing the seller’s new address.
It blew our minds to know that later on when mail is being misdelivered to the wrong address, without disclosure of the seller’s address, the buyer will be able to get the mail to the seller.
She says clients were encouraged to know they’d have one place for all of their information about the home.
How a home transition platform strengthens the agent and client relationship
Walton George agents stay in touch with clients long after closing. Karen says those conversations can come up five or six years later, and HomeHandoff gives her team a place to pull up the home’s information quickly when they do.
I think that HomeHandoff will strengthen the relationship between the realtor and the client.
She’d also like to see other brokerages in her market adopt it, so buyers and sellers get the same level of information about a home no matter who represents them. For Karen, the platform adds to what her agents already do for their clients.
HomeHandoff is not replacing us, it’s enhancing us and helping the whole process.
Bring HomeHandoff to your brokerage
HomeHandoff gives every agent in your office a branded home transition platform for the listing appointment, the move, and the years after closing. Book a walkthrough to see how it would work for your brokerage.
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