The Final Walkthrough Starts Before the Final Walkthrough

I was a few hours away from my first seller-side closing when my phone rang the night before.

It was my seller. He wanted to give me an update on the move-out. While packing up, he'd taken down a wall-mounted television and its mount. The removal left a few small drill holes in the wall. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned something else. Some wall-mounted display items had come down in the garage, and a little paint had peeled away with them.

He didn't think much of it. To him, this was just what moving looks like. He asked, reasonably, why any of it should cost him anything.

I understood his point. None of it sounded like damage in any meaningful sense. It sounded like a house being lived in, and then un-lived in.

But I wasn't thinking about the holes. I was thinking about the next morning.

The buyers' final walkthrough was scheduled about two hours before closing. I wasn't going to be there, I'd planned to meet everyone directly at the closing table. Which meant the buyers were about to walk into that house, on their own, and see something different from what they remembered seeing before. And they wouldn't have any context for it.

That was the actual problem. Not the holes. The gap between what they'd expect to see and what they were about to see, with nobody in the room to explain it.

I had three ways I could handle it.

I could say nothing and hope it didn't come up. I could get ahead of it by immediately offering money or repairs before anyone asked. Or I could just make sure nobody walked into that house confused.

I went with the third one.

I reached out to the buyer's agent that morning, before the walkthrough. I told him plainly what had changed, the TV mount, the garage items, the small holes and the paint pull that came with them. I said I'd be checking with my seller about options if his clients wanted anything addressed, but wanted to flag it ahead of time so there were no surprises.

That was the whole message. I want to be specific about what I didn't do, because it mattered as much as what I did. I didn't offer a credit. I didn't suggest a number. I didn't concede that anything needed to be fixed. I didn't go looking for a problem that hadn't been raised yet by the people who'd actually have to live with the decision.

I gave the other side information. I didn't negotiate against my own client before anyone had asked me to.

The walkthrough happened. Nothing blew up. A couple of hours later, I sat down for my first closing representing a seller from listing to closing table. It closed the way it was supposed to.

I was genuinely nervous that morning, in the ordinary way anyone is nervous the first time they're about to finish something they've worked a long time toward. What stayed with me wasn't the holes. It was how easily that morning could have gone differently if I hadn't made one phone call.

Since then, every seller transaction includes a checkpoint 48 to 72 hours before closing, what's coming off the walls, mounting hardware, fixtures versus personal property, damage from the move itself, keys and remotes and access devices. Small things a buyer will notice the moment they walk into a house expecting to see the one they remember.

At the time, we didn't have that. It surfaced because my seller happened to mention it the night before, not because I'd asked. That's not a system. That's luck.

It is now.