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What if the difference between listing your house as-is and walking away with real money came down to knowing exactly where to put $10,000 — and exactly where not to?
That’s the question I dug into on this episode of Real Estate Right Now with Steve Kruger, Senior Listing and Sales Expert with Linda Craft Team, REALTORS. Steve’s team built a Fix & Flip program that lets sellers renovate before they list and pay at closing — but here’s what most people miss: the real value isn’t the financing. It’s Steve walking through a home and telling you, room by room, which fixes actually move the sale price and which ones are just money out the window.
We spent real time on this, because it’s the heart of the episode — how Steve decides whether spending $10,000, $25,000, or $50,000 leaves a seller ahead at the closing table, or just leaves them poorer with a shinier house. And we didn’t stop at theory. Steve walked us through an actual before-and-after: the condition the home was in, what he recommended, what it cost, and what it sold for. That one example alone is worth the listen.
If you’ve got a home that needs some love before you sell — or you’ve been told “just list it as-is” and aren’t sure that’s the right call — catch the full conversation, “Fix It, List It, Profit: The Smart Way to Sell for More.” Link in the comments. Then tell me: what’s the one improvement you’d never skip before selling?
L
inda Craft Team, REALTORS no matter where you live in the world, Linda Craft and her team can help you find the best professional in your area to help you sell or buy your next home.
While most real estate professionals belong to a nationally affiliated company where they are obligated to use the people in their company’s network.
Linda Craft Team are privately owned and operated. That means they can find the absolute best professional from ANY company to ensure you get the best service.
Located in the Raleigh Research Triangle Park of North Carolina…they are indeed legendary when it comes to service. Learn more by going to Linda Craft & Team, REALTORS www.LindaCraft.com
Hey…do me a favor and please tell your friends to subscribe to A New Direction on their favorite podcast platform and give us a 5 star rating we are so grateful when you do!
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Meet Jay Izso
Executive Performance Coach | Host of A New Direction
Every week on A New Direction, I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance. The conversations go deep. We talk about the decisions that built companies, the mistakes that nearly destroyed them, and the personal breakthroughs that changed everything.
But here’s what most people don’t know about me: the show is an extension of the work I do every day with executives behind closed doors.
Who I Am
I’m an Executive Performance Coach. I work with CEOs and founders of $5M-$50M companies who have hit a wall they can’t explain. The marketing looks fine. The team is capable. The market is there. But the business won’t move.
The problem, almost every time, is the person running it.
I find the personal behavioral patterns that are driving the business dysfunction. Then I help the CEO disrupt those patterns so the company can grow. That’s it. No motivational platitudes. No vision boards. Diagnostics, intervention, results.
Where This Comes From
My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in.
The farm. I grew up as a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska—population 100. I started working at nine years old. By the time I left for college, I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, pain is part of the job, and the work has to get done whether you feel like it or not. I was fourteen the first time I had to castrate boars. Nobody was going to do it for me. That lesson never left: sometimes you have to do things afraid.
The forensic psychology unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham—co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis—in a human behavior lab focused on real-world problems. I then served in a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington, a forensic setting where I conducted psychological evaluations of individuals charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months assessing human behavior at its most extreme taught me how to cut through defenses, identify what’s really driving someone’s decisions, and see what they can’t see in themselves.