Author: Paul Stagg

In the last few weeks I’ve shown twenty properties as a buyer’s agent. Two listing agents followed up with me afterward looking for real feedback. Two. I provided feedback for one of these houses through an automated form noting that the property was in poor enough condition that it probably shouldn’t be on the market.…

January gets all the credit. Resolutions, fresh starts, the sense of a reset, and that this time, this year, will be different. There is a cultural apparatus built around the idea that the first of January is when meaningful change becomes possible, and that if you didn’t start then, you’ve already missed the window. I’ve…

Fall is one of the more compelling selling windows of the year in both Naples and Baltimore, and it’s often misunderstood. The conventional wisdom about fall real estate tends to focus on what Fall isn’t. It isn’t the spring peak. It isn’t the frenzy of a market where buyers are competing aggressively and sellers can…

The moment I decided to leave corporate life wasn’t dramatic. I was a Director at Coca-Cola, leading a team of roughly 120 people, when the job I had spent years working toward finally appeared on the internal posting board. I looked at it, waited for the pull I expected to feel, and got something else…

There is a perception of Baltimore that exists in the national conversation shaped by headlines, television, and the broad-stroke narrative that gets applied to many cities. That perception of Baltimore is not particularly useful if you’re trying to understand where to buy a home here. Time spent in the neighborhoods themselves is useful. Time spent…

It was made by a couple from the Midwest who had been coming to Naples every February for eleven years. They knew their favorite restaurant on Fifth Avenue. They knew the beach spot they preferred and what time the sunset looked best from it. They knew the feeling of arriving at the airport in the…

The word luxury gets used a lot in real estate. It appears in listing descriptions, in brokerage taglines, in agent bios. It has become overused; a word that communicates much less than it used to. When everything is luxury, nothing particularly is. What actually matters to the clients who have options and know how to…

If you’ve ever watched a real estate negotiation play out on reality television, you’ve seen a version that bears almost no resemblance to what actually happens in a well run transaction. The dramatic counteroffer delivered at the eleventh hour. The aggressive opening move designed to establish dominance. The walkaway bluff that somehow always gets called…

Every quarter tells a story. The question is whether you’re reading it carefully enough to know what it’s actually saying. Q2 2025 was not a dramatic quarter in either Naples or Baltimore. There were no headlines, no sharp corrections, no sudden surges that caught the market off guard. What there was, in both markets, in…

The listing looks perfect. The photos are stunning. The location is right. The price, while significant, is within range. Everything on the surface checks out. And yet the most experienced buyers, the ones who have made consequential financial decisions throughout their careers, know that the surface is exactly where the analysis begins, not where it…