A few years ago, I noticed houses seemed like they were being flipped on my block. Neighbors moved, the tell tale gentrification font house numbers turned up. I looked up the houses on Zillow and saw their updated interiors and prices many multiples of what I bought my house for about a decade before. I asked on my synagogue’s list serv about how people had handled their house sales in markets like this and got a lot of great advice. Now that I’ve actually sold my house, I can share about the experience.

Estimate a “reasonable” sales price

In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, prices can go up a lot in a short time. Kaytee Ray-Riek walked me through the math she used. She suggested, starting from a more typical appreciation rate and then adding in the money put into the house, adding in a little to cover the difference for the new increased mortgage interest rates. What estimated appreciation rate you use could be lots of things, I tried out math with the return on CDs at the time ~3% or the “typical” stock market return of 5% or you could go by inflation, typical house appreciation rates (~10%/yr depending on the area), or some other comparable benchmark. I did this math after I talked to Kaytee and it also brought me under the Zillow-based market value range. It was a super helpful benchmark to start from.

For additional context, The Reinvestment Fund and Pew have done some fantastic recent research on the single family home market in Philly, diving into topics like racial inequities and the impact of investors.

Consider your neighbors

I stumbled on a research paper about selling your home in a gentrifying neighborhood that made me think about whether significantly underpricing my home might affect my neighbors when they go to sell their houses. This was especially on my mind because in the intervening couple of years since my initial research, mortgage interest rates went up even more and a nice, well loved, and fixed up (but not granite countertop level) home across the street from me languished on the market at a price it would have easily commanded a year or two earlier.

While a lot of people advised that a single lower price isn’t going to throw off the comps, I didn’t want to make my neighbors’ lives harder. So this did weigh on me.

You can help sell it by marketing to your network

Multiple people mentioned doing your own outreach. There’s also the option of working with a lawyer to handle the paperwork of the sale, and for a fraction of the cost of working with a real estate agent. Even when working with an agent, people I talked to did a lot of their own outreach to their personal networks of people who may be looking for a solid house at a non-exploitative price.

I did this a bit, but there were some issues with my house and I wasn’t sure whether they were big issues or small issues. It made me nervous to do too much outreach when I wasn’t totally sure what it is I was selling. Given this, I did ultimately work with a real estate agent and that was a huge help with this issue. (I worked with Ife Foy, who I highly recommend!) Ife said we could get a pre-listing inspection, which was a thing I did not even know existed. So not only did I get a sense of what the issues were, we were able to be completely up front with buyers about it. It was such a great idea and made me feel a lot more confident in the process.

In working with Ife, I was clear that I did not want to sell to a developer. While we did get offers from developers and Ife presented those offers to me (as agents are required to do), Ife helped me assess the other offers and didn’t push me to re-consider the ones from developers. As far as I can tell through the process, I sold to someone who intends to live in the house. I hope they like it as much as I did!

Thinking about the proceeds

Part of what got me on this ethical homeselling thread was Rick Steves. He’s written about his experience leasing and then ultimately donating homes to a local nonprofit. I found this super inspiring, and still hope to do it at some point in my life! Given that I still owed on the mortgage, and due to life factors could really use the nest egg that had built up, I wasn’t able to donate the home at this time and selling it directly to a nonprofit did not work out. (In the future, something like the pre-listing inspection could have been a great document to bring to a nonprofit with an idea like this too, so they have a better sense of what they might be getting into.)

So, I ultimately sold the house at a pretty regular price (slightly under its assessed value and in the range of the napkin math I had done on Kaytee’s recommendation). The final step in this process was considering what to do with the money. I’m not immediately buying another home, so the options were a bit more open than in most sales situations. Some considerations I came across:

• as mentioned in the research paper and in other conversations, you can donate part of the proceeds! I’m still deciding exactly how to do this, but have budgeted roughly 10% of the proceeds.
• if you ever had a roommate, you could consider sharing some portion of the proceeds with them. Ash Sarkar has spoken about how even having a roommate makes you a landlord and that it privatizes gains to only one party. Sharing with roommates pushes back on that dynamic.

I was surprised how different this process was from buying a home. After a while, I realized I know way fewer people who have ever sold a home than who have bought one. There’s so much information about supporting first time buyers. It felt harder as the seller to understand what were rules, what were ways people usually do things, and how to weigh competing priorities and needs. Being able to ask friends and neighbors for feedback was a huge help! Thank you to everyone who helped me through this process.

If you have any questions or want any further details, please feel free to reach out. Housing is a human right, and as we work to change the systems that try to privatize profit instead of providing housing, we can also try to do our part as individuals to make things that tiny bit less shit.

• Header image description: an askew view of a for sale house sign
• Header image: Ian Muttoo, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr

Last modified on November 5, 2025