starstarstarstarstar almost 4 years ago
Mixed feelings
Amanda was really nice and easy to work with. We sold our first house with her and I would've left a glowing 5+ star review after that process. She had the house staged, really seemed to personally be involved in every step, and things went smoothly.
A year and a half later we unexpectedly decided to move out of state and decided to work with her again. We had our initial meeting and felt good about the plan. We were surprised when it seemed like we got handed off to her assistant after that initial meeting, though. Amanda did still involve herself, but it was more in an occasionally touching base sort of way and my impression was that her assistant was mainly running things. I still probably would've called it a 4 or 4.5 star experience overall despite that because we did sell our house for asking price and it went smoothly. But there was one extremely frustrating issue that I honestly should probably rate the experience even lower for.
We lived in the house 1.5 years before selling. According to a rule we were not aware of, that meant any profit we made was fully taxable income. After 2 years, something like the first $500,000 of profit is protected from being taxed. So if Amanda had simply informed us about this, we would've 100% waited 6 months to sell. But either she didn't know about it, which I'd argue is her responsibility as the realtor to know, or she chose not to tell us about it.
I won't speculate on which of those it was or why she might've chosen not to tell us if she did know. The facts were simply that we profited about $450K on the house because the market was exploding at the time and house values were way up. Because of my income, the majority of that was taxed at the top taxable bracket for the year and we ended up with a total tax bill of $109K out of pocket to the IRS. About half of that was because we sold our house 6 months too early.
We could've waited 6 months and saved about 50-60k if we'd just known.