For Kimo Quance, the most important decision in a home sale often comes before the listing: figuring out what the homeowner actually needs the transaction to accomplish.

Today, in our Best Stories in Town series, we’re sharing the story of Kimo Quance, Realtor with eXp Realty, TREC 369038, and the way his own experience as a buyer, homeowner, landlord, and Coast Guard veteran shaped the way he approaches real estate today.

This is a story about what happens before the listing — the questions, trade-offs, and decisions that can matter more than the transaction itself.

We hope you enjoy it.

Kimo Quance was 24 years old when he bought his first house in Las Vegas. He was buying on his own and had already made it to the closing table when someone told him how much money he needed for closing costs. He didn’t have it.

No one, he says, had explained those costs clearly beforehand. With the transaction already underway, Quance called his family and asked for help so he could close.

The deal went through. The experience stayed with him.

“That bothered me for years,” he says. “And I made up my mind that nobody I worked with was ever going to feel that.”

At the time, Quance wasn’t a Realtor, and real estate wasn’t the career he had planned. But the experience gave him an early view of something he would encounter repeatedly years later: the professional knows the process because they live inside it; the client may be encountering it for the first time.

Today, Kimo Quance, Realtor with eXp Realty, TREC 369038, serves buyers and sellers across Middle Tennessee. He has been involved in hundreds of transactions and more than $500 million in real estate sales. Yet when he talks about the work, he keeps returning to the questions that come before the deal.

What is the homeowner actually trying to accomplish? How much time do they have? What happens after the house sells?

Sometimes the answer is a traditional listing. Sometimes it’s a cash offer, seller financing or an assumable mortgage. Sometimes the best recommendation is not to sell at all.

Quance served in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1999 to 2003. When he left, he planned to become an air traffic controller. A friend talked him into trying sales instead. The switch happened quickly.

“My second month in, I was salesman of the month and outsold everybody on the floor,” he says. “That’s when I knew this was what I was built for.” Real estate came later, and first from the ownership side.

After buying that first home in Las Vegas, Quance moved a year later and kept the property as a rental. By 25, he was a landlord. For roughly eight years, he worked in sales while building a small portfolio on the side. In 2013, at 33, he got his California license and joined Keller Williams. The following year, he was named Rookie of the Year for the Southern California region. He eventually built a team that sold more than 100 homes a year.

Middle Tennessee was already familiar territory for Quance. He had been coming to the area for years before moving there with his two sons in 2022 and becoming licensed in the state that same year.

By then, his view of the business had already been shaped by years spent on the other side of the transaction.

“By the time I ever held a license, I’d already been the buyer, the owner and the landlord,” he says. “So when I sit down with a client, I’m not guessing what it feels like to be on their side of the table. I’ve been there.”

That perspective is most obvious at the beginning of the process. Before a transaction starts moving, Quance says he gives clients what amounts to a crash course: the market, the strategy, the sequence of events and the terms agents use every day but clients may be hearing for the first time. Then come the questions people are often reluctant to ask.

Can I get out of the deal? What happens if the inspection finds something serious? What if the house doesn’t appraise?

“We do this every day as Realtors, and a lot of agents assume their clients know everything they know,” he says. “They don’t.”

He would rather spend more time explaining things early than have a client trying to understand an unfamiliar concept while also making a consequential decision. It goes back to that first house in Las Vegas: surprises are harder to manage when you never knew they were coming.

For Quance, the traditional open market is still the right answer for most sellers. The difference is that he doesn’t want to arrive at that answer before he understands what the homeowner is actually trying to accomplish. He describes the process with a medical analogy.

“A good doctor doesn’t write the prescription before the exam,” he says. “They ask questions, they figure out what’s really going on, and then they prescribe what fits. I do the same thing.”

His version of the exam comes down to five things: the mortgage payoff, the seller’s goals, the timeline, the logistics of the move and what the seller plans to do next.

Two homeowners can own similar houses on the same street and still need very different outcomes. One may need as much equity as possible to buy the next home. Another may care more about certainty and speed. Someone who owns a property free and clear may want to explore owner financing with a CPA and other advisers. A homeowner with little equity, or one facing foreclosure, may need to look at the transaction differently. In some cases, an FHA or VA loan may be assumable.

“If the only thing I could offer was a listing, then every seller would get a listing whether it fit them or not,” Quance says. “I didn’t want to work that way. I wanted to have the right answer available, whatever it turned out to be.” Cash offers make those trade-offs easy to see.

Quance compares them to trading in a car. A seller knows they could probably get more by selling privately, but may accept less at the dealership because the transaction is immediate and uncomplicated.

“You take less, and I tell people that plainly,” he says. “The question is whether what you get in return is worth it to you.” That calculation changes from one homeowner to another. Someone who has already found a property out of state may value a certain closing date more than a higher offer weeks later. A house requiring major repairs may attract a very different buyer pool from one that is move-in ready.

“My job isn’t to talk anybody into cash or out of it,” Quance says. “It’s to put both numbers in front of them, be honest about the difference, and let them decide what their time and their peace of mind are worth.”

A house in Columbia, Tennessee, had been on the market for 158 days by the time the sellers came to Quance.

It hadn’t received a single offer.

There were obvious places to look for the problem: price, condition, presentation, marketing. Quance found something else in the mortgage. The sellers had a 3% assumable loan. That changed the way he saw the property.

“With rates in the high sixes and low sevens, a 3% mortgage is worth more to a buyer than new countertops,” he says.

The sellers did some painting and made a few updates, but the larger shift came in how the home was positioned. Instead of treating the financing as a technical detail behind the listing, Quance made it part of the reason a buyer might care about the property in the first place.

“We weren’t only selling a house anymore,” he says. “We were selling a house that came with a 3% payment.”

According to Quance, the house went under contract six days later, above asking price, with the buyer assuming the existing loan.

The house itself hadn’t changed much. The way it was understood had.

“The most valuable thing about that property wasn’t in the photos,” Quance says. “It was in the mortgage statement.”

Assumable loans aren’t available in every transaction, and qualification depends on the loan, the lender and the buyer. Other creative structures can also involve legal, tax and financial considerations that need professional review.

The Columbia sale is a useful example of where experience can show up. Sometimes it isn’t in having more information. It’s in recognizing which piece of information matters.

The listing had been online for months. The mortgage already existed. Someone had to notice what it meant.

Not every problem needs a better selling strategy.

A woman recently contacted Quance because her retired parents were thinking about selling their home and moving elsewhere. He asked about their current interest rate and monthly payment, then looked at what another home would likely cost them at current prices and borrowing rates.

The parents were living on a fixed income. The numbers didn’t improve their position.

Quance told them to stay where they were.

“I didn’t earn a commission that day, and I’m fine with that,” he says. “If I only gave advice that paid me, it wouldn’t be advice. It would be a sales pitch.”

That matters because real estate decisions often happen in the middle of something larger: divorce, relocation, foreclosure, financial pressure, downsizing or the death of a family member. The mechanics of a sale may be routine to an agent. The circumstances surrounding it are not routine for the person living through them.

“When life is already heavy, the last thing a person needs is more uncertainty,” Quance says. “People can handle hard news. What wears them down is not knowing.”

In a divorce, he says, that can mean explaining the process separately to both spouses so neither is getting important information secondhand.

Inherited property is closer to home. Quance had to sell his own father’s house after his father died.

When he works with a family in that situation, he doesn’t see the property only as something to price and transfer.

“I know it isn’t just a house to them,” he says. “And I don’t rush them.”

Long before Quance was dealing with low appraisals and failed inspections, his job occasionally put him on the phone with people facing far more serious emergencies.

In the Coast Guard, he worked as a telecommunications specialist monitoring VHF Channel 16, the maritime distress channel. A call might come from someone whose boat was taking on water or was already on fire.

“You learn fast that the person calling is having the worst day of their life, and the most useful thing you can be is calm,” Quance says. “You get the facts, you tell them exactly what happens next, and you stay with them.”

He doesn’t pretend a difficult home sale carries the same stakes. But the habit transfers.

An appraisal comes in low. An inspection uncovers an expensive problem. Financing becomes uncertain. A deadline that seemed distant suddenly matters.

The client is already anxious. Another anxious person in the room doesn’t help.

“They need a calm voice, a clear plan and somebody who stays on the line,” Quance says. “If I could do that for a boater whose boat was sinking, I can do it for an appraisal that came in low.”

His military background also shows up in smaller details. Quance comes from a military family — his father was retired Navy and his grandfather was a Marine — and says the emphasis on attention to detail followed him into real estate.

The things that hurt clients are often ordinary: a missed deadline, a box nobody checked, a number nobody explained.

At the same time, experience hasn’t convinced him that he can predict people.

Quance has appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters three times and Tiny House Hunters once. The shows didn’t change the way he thought about buyers, he says, but they put a familiar dynamic under a brighter light: two people can be buying the same house and still care about entirely different things.

“One of them cares about the kitchen and the other one cares about the commute,” he says.

Even now, clients surprise him.

“I’ll be sure I know which house they’re going to pick, and they go for the one I never would have guessed,” Quance says. “That keeps me humble. It’s why I ask a lot of questions and don’t assume I know what somebody wants.”

Consumers now have access to more real estate information than at any earlier point in Quance’s career: automated valuations, sales histories, neighborhood data, comparable properties and market statistics are all available within minutes.

Quance sees that as a good thing.

But it has changed what people need from an agent.

“Information isn’t the hard part anymore,” Quance says. “Interpreting it is.”

He uses Zillow’s Zestimate as an example. An algorithm can produce a number for almost any house, but it hasn’t walked through the property. It doesn’t necessarily know which improvements matter, what is missing or why two apparently similar houses should be valued differently.

The Columbia listing makes the point in another way. Every major real estate website could display the home. The listing had been sitting there for 158 days. The 3% loan existed the entire time.

“Every website had that listing,” Quance says. “Not one of them flagged that the seller had a 3% assumable loan, and that turned out to be the thing that sold it in six days.”

For Quance, the value of an agent is increasingly less about controlling access to information than making sense of it in context.

“Somebody who can take all that information and tell them what it means for their house, in this market, right now,” he says. “That’s the job.”

That context matters in Middle Tennessee, where newcomers sometimes arrive assuming the market will behave like the one they left.

Quance recently worked with relatives coming from Chicago to deal with an inherited home. They had been watching houses move quickly back home and were surprised to find conditions in Tennessee varying sharply even within relatively short distances.

“One area is still moving and another one twenty minutes away is sitting,” he says. “Real estate is local, and Middle Tennessee isn’t one market.”

A database can show what is listed and what was recently sold. Knowing how much weight to give that information is another matter.

After hundreds of transactions, Quance says there are three things he wants a client to remember: that he looked out for their interests, that they always knew where things stood and that they would feel comfortable referring him to someone they care about.

The last one matters most.

More than half of his business comes from referrals, he says.

“Nobody sends their sister or their best friend to an agent who let them down.”

Which brings him back, in a way, to Las Vegas.

Before the sales awards, before the hundreds of transactions, before the television appearances and before he ever held a real estate license, Quance was the 24-year-old buyer sitting at a closing table and learning about an important cost only when it was time to pay it.

Every local business has a story worth telling.

If you would like us to share yours, contact us at [email protected].