Frequently asked
Collected from twenty years of kitchen tables and phone calls, answered the way I would answer them in person. Where there is a number in the answer, the source and the date are on the page it came from.
I am the broker and owner of CK Real Estate Services in El Dorado Hills, California DRE #01483621. This is my third career. I spent twenty five years in healthcare as a dental hygienist, then ran an appraisal practice as a licensed residential appraiser, and I have been selling here since 2006. I took the real estate, appraiser and broker licenses all in the same year. I live here and have for most of my life.
Three things, honestly. I was an appraiser before I sold real estate, so pricing is the part of this I am most particular about and I will show you the comparable sales rather than hand you a number. I work almost entirely with people leaving a house they have been in a long time, which is a different job from selling a starter home. And a donation goes to NorCal Sheltie Rescue for every home I help sell.
El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Granite Bay, Cameron Park, Shingle Springs and Placerville. I deliberately do not claim the whole Sacramento region. Knowing which side of a street sits in which school district is the kind of thing you only get from working a small patch for a long time.
4905 Golden Foothill Parkway, El Dorado Hills, CA 95762. CK Real Estate Brokerage, DRE #01838079.
Homes are taking about twenty six days to sell and closing at roughly ninety nine percent of asking, while more than a third of listings take a price cut along the way. Those three figures together tell you the market will pay a fair price quickly and punish an optimistic one slowly. Redfin, July 2026.
About twenty six days on the market as of July 2026, but that is the median and your house is not the median. A well prepared home priced correctly usually goes faster than that. A home priced on hope sits, takes a cut, and then sells for less than it would have done at the right number in week one.
Kindergarten through eight in El Dorado Hills is split between the Buckeye Union and Rescue Union districts, and which one you are in depends on the street rather than the neighborhood. High school is El Dorado Union, and Oak Ridge is the draw: SchoolDigger ranks it 104th of 2,162 California public high schools on 2024 to 2025 data, with a 97.6 percent graduation rate.
Every public school in El Dorado Hills is listed here, with its statewide ranking, which of the two districts it belongs to, and the district lookups that answer it for a specific address.
A good share of my buyers come over the hill. It is about thirty three minutes to downtown Sacramento on Highway 50, you are above the fog line, and the two things nobody warns Bay Area buyers about are Mello-Roos and how much the traffic reverses on a Friday afternoon. I will pull the special tax on any parcel you send me, and the commute on the El Dorado Hills page.
Not calling an agent, actually. Work out what you would walk away with. The net proceeds calculator on the selling page does it in about a minute, after commission, escrow, title and the county transfer tax, and it does not ask for your email to work. Once you have that number the rest of the conversation is a real one.
The same way I did it as an appraiser: comparable sales, location, condition, improvements, what else is competing with you right now, and the details that make one house sell very differently from the one that looks like it next door. Then I show you the reasoning rather than just the number, and you make the decision.
Commission, escrow and title, the county transfer tax, and whatever you agree to cover for the buyer. The calculator on the selling page lets you put your own numbers in and see the total rather than being told a rule of thumb. What it will not do is guess at repairs, because that is a conversation about your specific house.
Usually far less than people fear. Most homes need paint, light, and a very hard look at what is on the surfaces. Occasionally there is one thing that genuinely matters and nobody would guess what it is. I would rather walk the house and tell you the three things worth doing and the six that are not than hand you a generic list.
The five phases I take longtime homeowners through: the clarity conversation, preparing the house room by room, positioning it properly, planning where you land, and then the move itself and settling in. It exists because the part people find hardest is not the selling, it is that nobody tells them what happens next. The whole thing is written down, and the fifteen page guide is on that page too.
There is rarely a moment. What people describe is a slow accumulation: the house feels bigger than it needs to be, the upkeep takes more out of you, and you catch yourself wondering what simpler would look like. That is not a crisis and it does not oblige you to do anything. It is just the point at which it is worth understanding your options.
It depends on your equity and your tolerance for risk, and it is the single question I get asked most. Sell first and you might be renting for three months. Buy first and you might be carrying two houses. Some people should sell and rent back from the buyer for sixty days. Some should bridge it. Some worried for nothing because the equity in their house made it simpler than they feared. The buyers page walks through the orders properly.
If you are fifty five or older, quite possibly. California Proposition 19 lets eligible homeowners transfer their assessed value to a replacement home anywhere in the state, up to three times, with the claim filed with the assessor where the new home is. For a long held El Dorado Hills home that is often the difference between affording the next house and not. It is explained properly on the selling page, and it is general information rather than tax advice.
Start in the low emotion rooms, the linen closet and the pantry and the office supplies, and work outward. Keep, donate, sell, discard. Donate the everyday things and only bother selling the specialty or higher value pieces, because the time you spend listing a used sofa is worth more than the sofa. There is no rush and progress matters more than perfection.
No, and most people are not. Plenty call a year out, some two, and a good number never move at all and we stay friendly anyway. Nobody signs anything to have a conversation and I do not chase people who tell me they are only thinking.
Fifteen minutes on the phone or at your kitchen table. I will ask what you are hoping the next few years look like, tell you honestly what the market is doing, and say what I would do in your position. If the answer is wait, I will say wait. There is no contract and no obligation at the end of it. Pick a time that suits you, or use the form at the bottom of this page.
Ask me the actual question. I read these myself and I will give you a straight answer, including when the straight answer is that it depends on something I would need to see.
Lets connect
No contract, no obligation, and no pressure to be further along than you are. Plenty of people write to me a year before they are ready, and that is genuinely the right time to write.
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