The pitch is the easy part
Danville sellers have options, and every agent who walks in will have a polished presentation and a confident number. The Mashore Group would rather be judged on the answers below than on the presentation.
Ask all seven before signing anything. What comes back will tell you more about how your sale actually goes than the listing agreement will.
What is the plan for this house specifically
Not what the agent does generally. What happens for this property, in this neighborhood, at this price, in writing, before you commit.
Most answers describe the MLS, an open house and a social media page. That is exposure: putting the house in a database and waiting to be found. It worked when buyers toured neighborhoods on Sundays and called the number on the sign, and most buyers no longer do that.
A real plan names the likely buyer, says where they will be reached, and explains what happens to somebody who engages and does not call. Ours is on the selling in Danville page.
How will you reach buyers from the Peninsula and Silicon Valley
Danville draws people relocating from higher-cost Bay Area markets, often working in Palo Alto, San Jose or San Mateo, trading a smaller expensive house for more space at a number that makes better sense.
Those buyers do not drive your street on a Sunday afternoon. They search online, watch listing videos at night, and scroll during a commute. If the plan for reaching them is that they will find it on a portal, that is the identical plan behind every other listing on that portal.
Ask specifically how buyers outside the immediate area get targeted, and whether that outreach starts before the listing goes live or after. Our relocation page covers what those buyers are weighing.
What do your recent results actually show
Ask for numbers rather than descriptions. Days on market. Final price against list. If they run digital campaigns, the actual reach and engagement from those campaigns.
An agent running genuine campaigns has these figures because the platforms report them automatically. An agent who does not will talk about effort instead. Either answer is informative, and you should ask to see the data rather than hear it summarized.
Ask about a comparable home too: what did a similar property nearby achieve, and what accounted for the difference. A specific answer with a mechanism behind it is worth far more than a headline number. Be skeptical of any figure quoted without a way to check it, including ours. The right response to an impressive number is to ask what produced it, and an agent who cannot answer that is quoting somebody else's result.
How do you approach pricing here
Ask for the methodology, not the number. Pricing in Danville is not a formula with comparables plugged in, because the neighborhoods vary and lot size, condition and renovation quality all move value differently at these price points.
A house backing onto open space competes for a different buyer than a similar house on a through street. That is a pricing fact, not a marketing line.
The right asking price is the one that creates genuine competition in the first two weeks. Too high and the listing ages, days on market starts doing damage on its own, and then you chase the market down with reductions that signal exactly what they look like. Start from what the house is worth.
What negotiation credentials do you hold
Danville transactions involve experienced buyers, large numbers and complex offer structures. What happens after an offer arrives is where sellers most often gain or lose the ground they built.
Krista Mashore holds the Master Certified Negotiation Expert designation from the Real Estate Negotiation Institute. That matters practically when a buyer returns after inspection asking for a substantial reduction, or when an appraisal comes in short and somebody has to absorb the gap.
Ask every agent what specific negotiation training they hold. What they cannot answer tells you as much as what they can.
What does the pre-listing timeline look like
The two to three weeks before the house goes live usually matter more than the two weeks after. That is when the content gets made, the campaign gets built, and awareness starts accumulating before the sign goes up.
Agents who skip that phase launch cold. Ask for the specific sequence: who does what, in what order, by when. The answer tells you whether this is a project with a system behind it or something worked out as it happens, and those produce very different outcomes.
And what happens if week two passes with nothing
Every listing sees its highest traffic in the first ten to fourteen days. After that, traffic falls and the people who looked in week one rarely circle back.
The answer to this question reveals whether there is a launch strategy or a hope. The whole point of the pre-listing work is arriving on day one with demand already built, so that offers are managed rather than awaited.
Ask all seven, compare how specific the answers are, then get in touch with The Mashore Group and make us answer them for your house. Our free seller guide covers the process end to end.