Trading up on Long Island, with the order worked out first

We are Mark Vogler and Gina DeMaio, a two-person team with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Laffey International Realty in Huntington, and trading up is where having one team on both sides pays off. The same two people price your current home, market it, find your next one and line up the dates, so nothing gets lost between two agents who never talk.

We start with the sale side, because that is where the money comes from. We walk your current house together, and Mark, with 30 years of construction behind him, tells you what a buyer will notice. We give you a range, then a price after the walk-through, side by side with the number you were hoping for. Our pricing method follows appraiser rules for comps, so the number holds up.

Then we sit down with your lender, or with two or three we recommend, and work out what you can buy and when. From there we pick an order and write it down: buy first, sell first, or list and buy close together. Your listing gets the Full Exposure Marketing Method, and your search gets the same Plan of Attack every buyer of ours gets.

The house you are leaving is the down payment on the one you want, so it deserves real attention before it goes on the market. We walk it, and Mark tells you which small repairs pay off and which ones a buyer will not care about. Gina looks at it the way a buyer will feel it, room by room, and helps with what to clear out, what to keep and how each space should read in photos.

We also have you check the paperwork early. Before listing, sellers pull their permits and certificate of occupancy at the building department. An old deck, a finished basement or an addition that never got signed off can slow a sale at the worst moment, and on a move up a slow sale can hold up your purchase too. Finding it a month before you list is much easier than finding it in the middle of two contracts.

While that is happening, we are already looking at houses with you, so both sides move forward at the same pace.

Trading up means you are a seller and a buyer at the same time, and the two sides pull against each other. You want the most for your current home, and you want to be strong on the next one. The worry we hear most is getting caught in the middle: sold with nowhere to go, or buying with a home you still have to carry. There is no single right order. It depends on how much equity you have, what your lender will allow, and how quickly homes like yours are selling in your town.

We sit down at your kitchen table and map both sides on paper before anything goes on the market. We walk your current house first so you see our price, your number, and how we got there, using comps from the same town, the same school district, the same style and a similar size. Then we build the buying side around that real figure instead of a guess. When you know what you are walking away with, you know how strong you can be on the next house.