In a “World’s Best” class we had last week, agents in the class firmly made the point that a fundamental aspect of a great service experience is getting the taxes right. From a listing perspective, you have to go to the town or village to get the right taxes, not just trusting the seller to tell you what he’s currently paying. And that also means understanding that a property might have village, town, school, county, etc. taxes to pay – we’ve had problems in situations where the taxes quoted only included the village but not the town, or vice versa.

And from a buyer’s perspective, it means checking out the taxes yourself when your buyers get close to making an offer, rather than trusting the seller’s estimation. Why? Because taxes have a dramatic impact on affordability, a point I made on on the Market Intelligence blog today.

So if we’re going to have at least one central tenet of “clean windows” service, it has to be: get the taxes right.