I am your neighbor who happens to be a real estate expert, not a real estate expert pretending to be your neighbor.
First and foremost I am a family man. Married 28 years. A daughter who is a freshman at Ohio State and a son who is a sophomore at Grove City High School. Above anything else on this page, that is my favorite thing to be.
Professionally, I have been a full-time REALTOR® since 2010, with Realty Forward, a small boutique brokerage right here in Grove City. Over the past year or so I have taken something of a hiatus from selling to serve as Executive Director of Grove City Town Center, Inc. We work like a chamber of commerce with the boundaries drawn tight around the historic downtown: advocating for the small businesses down here and putting on the Wine and Arts Festival, the Bourbon Festival, food truck nights, the holiday parade and the Mistletoe Market.
In whatever is left over, I am a partner in a small coffee roastery here in town, and I have been in a band called the Boondogglers for 21 years. We are down to about two gigs a year now.
Most days start at 5:30. A little meditation, some visualization, coffee, then get my son fed and out the door to school.
How I actually work
Before we talk about houses at all, I want a real conversation. I use the Socratic method, which in my words means asking you the same question five or six times until we get to what is actually driving it.
You will tell me you need four bedrooms and a twenty minute commute. So I ask what is important about four bedrooms and a twenty minute commute. You will say something about family, not wanting to spend an hour in a car when you could be with your kids. So I ask what is important about that. And eventually we are not talking about bedrooms at all, we are talking about how your house growing up was the hub, everybody came to your place, and you want that for your own kids. That is the thing we are actually shopping for. It changes the answer, and it changes which streets I show you.
Here is what else you should expect: I will tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear. If the house you love has a financing problem, you will know before we schedule the showing. It is a lot easier to make a friend out of a client than to turn a friend into a client, and I would rather have the friend.
Selling a house is what puts money in my bank account. People are why I do this. I would not do it for free, and I am not pretending otherwise, but getting paid well to help people solve a real problem, or out of a sticky situation, or into a new beginning, is the whole point of it.
Brent J. Miller, REALTOR® · Realty Forward · Ohio license sal.2010002123
Executive Director, Grove City Town Center, Inc.
Seller representation, and bridge-loan structuring when you are buying and selling at the same time.
