Florida is my licence. White Plains is a referral.

What actually happens next

Why you are reading this

You have probably already found three pages promising New York results from people who have never set foot there. This is not one of them. I hold one licence, it is Florida's, and everything below is built on that being true rather than on hoping you do not check.

Before you go: the structural differences

• Real estate licensing is state by state. An agent licensed in Florida cannot represent you in New York, and a New York licensee cannot represent you in Florida.
• Leaving Florida means picking up a state income tax in New York. Model it against the housing number before you settle on a price range, and take the actual arithmetic to a tax adviser rather than to any real estate agent, including me.
• Expect an attorney at the closing table in New York. Florida closings typically run through a title company instead, so the cast of characters, the fee structure and the sequence of the last two weeks will all look unfamiliar.
• Like Florida, New York has coastal exposure and a named-storm deductible regime in its property insurance market. The mechanism will feel familiar; the numbers will not necessarily.
• Neither the homestead exemption nor the Save Our Homes cap travels with you out of Florida. New York sets its own assessment rules, its own exemptions and its own limit on how fast a bill can rise — confirm the specifics with the local taxing authority rather than assuming a Florida analogue exists.

The questions that tell you who you are dealing with

• What is on the survey or title work here that a Florida buyer would not think to look for?
• If I need to back out, what actually happens to my deposit under a standard New York contract?
• How do you prefer to communicate, how quickly do you normally reply, and who covers your clients when you are away? Settle that in the first week and most of the friction in a long-distance transaction disappears.
• Do you work alone or as part of a team? If it is a team, ask who writes the offer, who attends the inspection, and who I will actually be speaking to at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

What this page is not offering

I will not take a payment from you, and could not lawfully do so if I wanted to. A Florida sales associate may be compensated only through his registered broker, so any fee here is paid by the receiving brokerage to The Keyes Company out of a commission earned only if a transaction closes. There is no invoice at the end of this and no version of it in which you are billed for an introduction.

What I can do directly, without an introduction

Sometimes the Florida property is not the one you live in. A second home, an inherited house, a unit that has been let for years — each of those sells differently and each carries paperwork that has to be in order before it can go on the market at all. If one of them is attached to your move to White Plains, that part sits squarely inside my licence, and it is worth starting early, because the documents take longer than the marketing does.

Other cities in New York

• Harriman
• Central Valley
• Montgomery
• New Windsor
• Beacon
• Fishkill
• Wappingers Falls
• Hyde Park
• All of New York