You Can't Live in the Ceilings
Practical Advice for BC Home Buyers, Sellers, and the Agents Who Serve Them
The informative real estate guide You Can’t Live in the Ceilings explains home buying and selling processes with acumen.
Mary Cleaver’s practical real estate guide, You Can’t Live in the Ceilings, covers the nebulous process of finding, buying, and selling a home.
Touching on broad truths about working with a real estate agent while referring to specific challenges in Canada’s Vancouver market, the book introduces concepts central to buying and selling a house, including negotiation tactics, motivations, and marketing techniques. In explaining the work of a real estate agent, it covers how agents are paid, what services they must provide, the dangers of speaking with noncontracted agents, and why it’s important to have new construction homes inspected.
Covering each aspect of the home buying process in a tidy way—for instance, the practice of showing a home to potential buyers is explored via potential steps like procuring a lockbox, using an unlicensed real estate assistant, getting an agent, and having an open house—the book addresses the benefits and drawbacks of each option that it names. It examines potential choices in relation to different marketing strategies, too. Often, agents come out on top in these scenarios.
The book’s preponderance of lists and action plans will prove useful to those facing the decision-making process. Indeed, it is full of recommendations for specific tasks, including the personal research that it says should proceed all significant choices. When discussing how to choose a real estate agent, for example, the book highlights common misconceptions, such as that the best agent is the one who is most pleasant to talk to. Still, many of its recommendations are intuitive, as with the suggestion to make sure that one’s real estate agent is familiar with the local market.
More expansive are the book’s consideration of factors like a home’s resale value, and how this should affect the purchase of a forever home as opposed to a starter home. And helpful illustrations appear, as with the floor plans of two similar-sized homes that are evaluated in terms of their room layouts and build styles as they relate to salability. Here and elsewhere, the book’s nuanced observations, clear figures, and careful analyses help to shed light on industry-specific principles.
A meticulous guide to finding a real estate agent and buying or selling a home, You Can’t Live in the Ceilings approaches real estate processes with acumen.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
