There is a strange couple of weeks before a house goes on the market when you start seeing it the way a stranger will. The hallway paint you stopped noticing in 2016. The closet door that sticks. You walk your own house like an inspector and it stops feeling like home somewhere around the second lap.
Every seller we have worked with hits that week. It is not really about the paint. It is that you are about to hand the most valuable thing you own to somebody and trust them to get it right, and you have almost no way to judge in advance whether you picked well.
So let us tell you what you would actually be buying.
01
Two people, and not two of the same person
Most teams are one agent and an assistant with a business card. This one is a genuine fifty-fifty, and the reason it works is that we came into it from opposite directions.
Jeff has been licensed since 1991, and between the two of us we have closed more than $750 million in our careers. We do not lead with that because volume is impressive. We lead with it because of what it means practically: there is very little that can happen in a transaction that Jeff has not already watched happen, usually more than once.
That matters far less than you would think on the easy deals. Anybody can sell a house that three buyers want. It matters enormously on the other kind — the appraisal that comes in low, the inspection that turns up something structural, the buyer whose lender goes quiet ten days out. Those are the weeks you are actually paying for, and they are the weeks where experience stops being a talking point and becomes the whole job.
He has also spent a good part of his career on the other side of this business, as past president of both MetroTex and NTREIS. That is not a credential a seller should care about on its own. What it means for you is that he has sat in the rooms where the contracts and the rules get argued over, so when he tells you what a paragraph in your contract actually does, he is not reading it for the first time either.
Jeff Updike and Weston Pugh have each been named a D Magazine Best Real Estate Agent seven years running (2018–2024) and D Magazine Top Producers in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2025 and 2026.
Weston came up the other way. He started in real estate in high school, working for a local broker, then spent his post-college years in marketing for one of the large Texas auto dealership groups — which is an education in getting people through a door whether you want it to be or not. After that came years at Medallion Homes in San Antonio, learning new construction and new-home marketing in an industry where marketing a house is not an afterthought, it is the entire operation.
He moved to Dallas in 2007, got licensed, and we have been partners ever since. He runs sales and marketing on the new-construction and conversion projects we take on, which is its own discipline, and he brings that same builder-side rigor to a resale listing.
So one of us has been learning what goes wrong and how to fix it since 1991, and the other has spent his career learning how a house actually gets sold. You do not have to choose. You get both, and one of us is always reachable, because deals do not fall apart when nobody was smart enough. They fall apart when nobody picked up the phone on a Friday afternoon.
02
Getting the house in front of people
Marketing a house is not one big move. It is a lot of small ones stacked in the right order, and the order is the part most agents get wrong.
Before anything goes live, we photograph the house properly and draw a real floor plan, because the most common reason a buyer scrolls past is that they cannot work out how the rooms connect. Where the lot or the street is part of the story — and in a lot of Northwest Dallas it is — we shoot it from the air, so people can see what listing photos physically cannot show them.
Then we put it in front of the people who sell houses for a living, before we put it in front of the internet. Office exclusives and broker tours exist because the agent who has been driving a buyer around for six weekends is the fastest path to an offer, and that agent would rather hear about your house from another agent than from a portal alert.
After that it goes wide, and it keeps going. Your house shows up in a newsletter our closest clients have been reading for more than ten years, in the magazine that goes to our top clients, on our podcast, and at open houses we work rather than sit through.
All of it buys attention. What none of it does is rescue a wrong number, which is why how we price is the first conversation we have and not the last.
03
What we will not do
We will not buy your listing. If another agent quotes you a number well above ours, ask them to show you the three sales that support it. Sometimes they can, and if they can, listen to them. Usually what you are being handed is a number chosen to win the appointment, and you will meet the real number anyway in about six weeks, from a worse position.
We will not tell you what you want to hear about your house. If the kitchen is going to cost you, we would rather say so in your living room in September than let a buyer say it with an offer in November.
And we will not go quiet after the option period. The stretch between contract and closing is where most of the real work lives, and it is also where most sellers say their agent disappeared.
04
Where to start
Most people start with a number, and that is reasonable — you cannot plan anything until you know roughly what you are working with. If you want to see how we read a market before we ever get to your kitchen table, the Market Watch page walks through a month of real Dallas figures and what is actually underneath them.
But a number off a website is a starting point and nothing more. The useful conversation takes about an hour, happens in your house, and costs you nothing.
Everything we have written for sellers is on one page: Selling a home in Dallas →