How do I sell my Palo Alto home if I am moving away or already gone?

Most of a Palo Alto sale can be run without you in the room, as long as the decisions that need you are settled before you leave. What matters is agreeing in advance who approves what, how you want to be kept up to date, how the house is accessed while it is empty, and how signing and closing will be handled from where you are.

A Palo Alto sale run for an owner who is somewhere else is ordinary work — I do it regularly, and for sellers three time zones away and eight. It goes wrong in one way and one way only: when decisions that needed the owner were left to be made later, from a distance, under time pressure.

So nearly all of this is about what gets agreed before you go.

Settle before you leave

What the preparation will be, and what it will cost. Walk the house with me while you are still here if there is time. You will leave with a written scope, a budget and an order of work, and after that the approvals are small ones rather than open questions. What preparation costs has the current Peninsula figures, and what to fix before selling covers how that list gets decided.

Who approves what, and up to what number. The single most useful thing you can do. Agree a budget I can work within without calling, and a threshold above which I will always ask first. Without it, every $400 decision becomes an international phone call, and the work stalls between them.

Who else can speak for you. A spouse, an adult child, a sibling nearby. Say so explicitly, and say what they can and cannot decide.

What leaves and what stays. Furniture, appliances, the contents of the garage and the shed. Staging works better from an empty house, and clearing it after you have gone is slower and more expensive than clearing it before.

The keys, the codes and the paperwork. Gate and alarm codes, the lockbox, the solar and pool accounts, the HOA contact if there is one, and any permits, plans or warranties you have. Photograph the files rather than shipping them.

The utilities. Leave power and water on. A house with no lights, no working bathroom and a dead irrigation system does not show, and the gardener cannot keep the garden alive without water.

While it is on the market

Updates on a schedule, not on events. Agree a rhythm — most out-of-area sellers want a written update once a week plus a call after each open house weekend — so you are not left wondering and I am not sending messages you did not ask for. Say which channel you actually read: email, text or WeChat, and I work in English and Mandarin.

Access. Vendors, inspectors, photographers, the stager, agents showing the house. An empty house is simpler here than an occupied one: a lockbox and a showing schedule cover almost everything, and I am at the property for the work that matters. You will hear about anything unexpected the same day.

The house itself, while nobody is living in it. Landscaping on a schedule, the interior kept clean through showings, mail forwarded or collected, and somebody — me — laying eyes on it regularly. Tell your insurer the property is vacant; a vacancy provision in a homeowner’s policy is easy to miss and expensive to discover.

Decisions made on a call. Pricing, offers, counters, repair requests. Nothing here requires you to be standing in the house, but it does require you to be reachable at an agreed time. If the time difference is large, we set the window at the outset rather than negotiating it in the middle of an offer deadline.

Signing and closing from somewhere else

This is the part people expect to be difficult and it usually is not.

Listing agreements, disclosures, offers and counters are signed electronically as a matter of course. The documents that need notarizing — the deed above all — are the exception, and there are several routes: a notary wherever you are, a mobile notary sent to you, and at a U.S. embassy or consulate if you are abroad.

Do not assume you can do it online. California has passed a remote online notarization law, but the Secretary of State’s own notice says the remaining provisions become operative “when the Secretary of State has completed the technology project necessary to implement the new provisions or by January 1, 2030, whichever is earlier” (California Secretary of State — notary customer alerts). What decides it in practice is what your escrow and title company will accept, so ask them early. That call is theirs, not mine.

Raise notarization with escrow at the start, not at the end. Getting a notarized deed back from another country can take days or weeks, and it sits directly on the closing date. A power of attorney is sometimes the answer, and sometimes it is not: it has to be acceptable to the title company and to the lender, and it should be reviewed by your attorney. That decision is much easier made early.

Proceeds are wired. Confirm the wiring instructions with escrow by phone, using a number you looked up yourself — wire fraud in real estate is targeted at exactly this moment, and it targets remote sellers hardest.

If you are not a California resident at the time of sale, withholding may apply at closing. What it costs to sell a house in Palo Alto covers that, and your CPA can tell you what it means for you.

If you have already gone

Then we start with a video walkthrough rather than a visit, and I send photographs of anything I would otherwise be pointing at. Everything above still applies; it just gets agreed on a call instead of at the kitchen table. The one thing worth arranging quickly is somebody local — or me — with access, so the house is not sitting unattended while decisions are made.

What I do

I manage the property end to end: the assessment and the pricing, the preparation and the trades, the staging, the photography and marketing, the showings, the offers, and the coordination with escrow and title through close. You approve; I execute and report.

If you are buying where you are going, I can introduce you to an agent there and keep the two calendars against each other, so the Palo Alto sale is working to your dates rather than its own.