Beyond the Listing: John Wei Talks Peninsula Market and Legacy Homes With Clarissa Cortez of KW

The Agent Who Became a Financial Advisor, a Tax Professional, and a Loan Officer Before She Ever Sold a House

John Wei at Nexa Lending welcomed Clarissa Cortez of Keller Williams Peninsula to the Beyond the Listing podcast for a conversation that covers twenty-three years of Bay Area real estate cycles, the DoorDash buyer phenomenon reshaping what sellers need to do before listing, the nuanced picture of the condo market versus single-family homes, and a specialty in trustee and inherited properties that she has turned into one of the most gratifying parts of her practice.

Clarissa did not arrive in real estate through a conventional path. She was a financial advisor at a bank, packaging loans and creating client portfolios, when she got pregnant with her third child and learned he would have special needs. The demands of medical appointments made her current job structure impossible to maintain. Her regional manager at the bank noticed that she had essentially been doing loan work all along and suggested she get her real estate license so she could work remotely on her own schedule.

She thought it would be a one or two year detour. Twenty-three years later she is still in it and enjoying it more than she ever expected.

Along the way she also taught tax preparation for a company running a beta program that combined tax professionals with financial advising. The result is a practitioner who sits with buyers and sellers and sees not just the transaction in front of her but the tax implications, the financial portfolio context, and the long-term investment picture simultaneously. She describes it as having a much broader frame than just one transaction.

She calls herself the real estate auntie now and the name fits.

The DoorDash Buyer and What It Means for Sellers

Clarissa identifies a fundamental shift in buyer expectations that has significant implications for how sellers need to prepare their properties. When she started in real estate buyers expected to find something with good bones that needed work. They wanted elbow grease opportunities. They bought as-is properties and fixed them up themselves.

That buyer largely does not exist anymore. Today's buyer tells her they do not know the difference between a screwdriver and a hammer. They want everything done. She calls them DoorDash buyers because they want their home the way they want their food: ready, delivered, and exactly as expected with no assembly required.

The flip side is that sellers who understand this shift and prepare their homes accordingly are rewarded significantly. Not just with higher offers but with a broader buyer pool. A property that is move-in ready attracts the DoorDash buyers who make up the majority of today's market. A property sold as-is is competing for a much smaller subset of buyers who are increasingly rare.

Clarissa works with sellers to understand the trade-offs across multiple price points. If you invest in preparation here is what the comps suggest you can achieve. If you scale back here is the adjusted expectation. If you sell as-is here is the buyer pool you are speaking to. She does not impose a single strategy. She educates sellers on what each path produces and lets them choose based on what matters most to them.

The Peninsula Market in September 2026

Clarissa's market read is specific and differentiated by product type and geography rather than a single blanket assessment of the Bay Area.

Single-family homes throughout San Francisco and San Mateo County are still hot. She describes a listing in Menlo Park where she put the property on the MLS on Monday hoping to catch the broker tour cutoff for Tuesday. Over a hundred agents walked through at the broker tour. By seven that evening she had one offer. By ten the next morning she had two more. By midday she had a fourth. The property was not even formally on the open market yet.

She still sees buyers competing against ten to fifteen other offers on desirable single-family properties. The spring market was particularly aggressive with buyers who entered the year with some flexibility finding themselves fully priced out of their target neighborhoods by the end of spring. She advises buyers from the beginning about what the seasonal trajectory looks like so they can move with appropriate urgency rather than discovering later that the window they had in January has closed.

The condo and townhouse market is a different story. Slower. The combination of SB 326 balcony inspection requirements adding costs to HOA budgets, insurance premium increases that hit associations hard over the past couple of years, and special assessments that emerged from both have made the monthly cost of condo ownership less predictable and in some cases significantly higher than buyers anticipated. That uncertainty has cooled demand and softened pricing in the condo segment.

Clarissa is careful not to dismiss condos as a category. She makes the case directly to buyers who come in saying they do not want anything with an HOA. She walks them through the compensating factors. Someone else mows the lawn. Someone else handles the roof when it needs replacement. The HOA restrictions that feel limiting are also what protects the value of everyone's unit. And most importantly you cannot play the game of real estate unless you are in the game. If a condo is what gets you in, five years from now you may be holding equity that funds the move to the single-family home you ultimately want.

She is also watching the ADU market evolve. Cities that once made permitting an in-law unit difficult are now handing out ADU permits readily and running workshops to help homeowners navigate the process. Duplexes in San Francisco are trading at interesting price points relative to single-family homes for reasons worth understanding. A property with an existing ADU or the genuine potential to add one represents a fundamentally different long-term investment than one without.

The Legacy Home Specialty That Has Become Her Favorite Work

Clarissa has gravitated increasingly toward what she calls legacy homes. Trustee sales and inherited properties where someone calls her apologetically saying there is a house to sell and they are not sure what to do with it. The voice on the phone is almost always tinged with something like grief even when the relationship to the property is more distant.

Her approach to these listings starts with a question most agents would never think to ask. Who lived here? Tell me about this house. What she finds underneath the aging furniture and the months or years of neglect is almost always a story. A family. A life built inside these walls. Decades of decisions and celebrations and ordinary Tuesday mornings.

She communicates that story to buyers. Not as a sales tactic but as genuine truth about the property they are considering. A house with a story is warmer than a house without one and buyers feel the difference even when they cannot articulate why.

The financial results of this approach have been striking. A trustee called her saying the property was a fixer and probably a teardown. She saw past the surface condition to what was underneath and asked for a budget to work with. The trustee was reluctant but agreed. The sale closed at one and a half million dollars over the number the trustee had privately set as her acceptable outcome. Another trustee who expected to get a certain number and was calling the morning of to say they might be priced too high walked away giddy at how far the result exceeded expectations.

In each case the investment in preparation, the storytelling that communicated the home's history and warmth, and Clarissa's ability to see the bones beneath the neglect produced results that simply would not have been achievable with a standard as-is approach.

Advice for Sellers in the Current Market

Prepare everything before going live. In the Bay Area it is normal and customary to have disclosure packets, inspection reports, and all relevant documentation ready before the listing activates. Sellers who resist this are setting themselves up to renegotiate after they have already negotiated.

Clarissa takes sellers through the offer and purchase agreement in advance so they understand what buyers will ask for before they receive those asks in a competitive and emotionally charged moment. She builds multiple scenario pricing models so sellers understand the relationship between preparation investment and achievable sale price rather than discovering it after the fact.

She also insists on weekly communication at minimum regardless of seller preference for text. A text might be convenient but a home worth several million dollars is worth fifteen minutes of direct conversation. She maintains that standard not as a policy but because she believes it produces better outcomes for everyone involved.

Advice for Buyers in the Current Market

Do not play games. Do not come in with a lowball offer strategy learned from a book written a decade ago and written about a different market. She can tell buyers without writing an offer whether a property is going to respond to that approach and in the current peninsula market it will not.

She calls the listing agent before offers are written to gather intelligence. How many offers are expected? What matters to the seller beyond price? What terms create the cleanest path to closing? She brings that information to her buyers so the offer is structured with context rather than in a vacuum.

When buyers love a property she encourages them to go for it rather than testing the market with a number they would not be sad to lose. Today's selling price becomes tomorrow's comparable. The buyer who was outbid today is going to face a higher baseline the next time a similar property comes available. Paying a price that feels aggressive today may look prescient within eighteen months.

She is also honest that the market remains competitive at the single-family home level after a brief period of softening. The articles saying the market has gone down are typically measuring national averages or broader California data that do not reflect what she sees every Tuesday at broker tours in specific Peninsula neighborhoods. She is boots on the ground in a way that no aggregated dataset can replicate.

The Personal Touch in an AI World

Clarissa is genuinely present with her clients in a way she views as a non-negotiable differentiator. Her buyers often find properties before she does because they are laser-focused on their specific search while she is managing a broader view across multiple clients. She does not pretend otherwise. What she brings is the preparation, the context, the intel, and the human presence that makes a high-stakes emotional decision feel manageable rather than terrifying.

AI can approximate a lot of things. It cannot sit next to someone at a showing and ask what do you think. It cannot read the moment when a buyer floats through a house and realizes this is it and know enough to step back and let them have that moment. It cannot pick up the phone and call a listing agent and build the kind of collegial trust that produces real intel about offer dynamics.

She has a team but she is always the one her clients are working with and talking to. They know that when they hire Clarissa Cortez they are getting Clarissa Cortez.

How to Reach Clarissa Cortez

Call or text 650-922-3942. Visit clarissacortez.com. She answers the phone and considers it the best way to connect.

John Wei at Nexa Lending works with buyers throughout the Bay Area and Peninsula on mortgage financing. Reach out to John Wei to connect on the lending side of your next Peninsula transaction.

Sources

SanMateoCountyAssociationofRealtors.com
NAR.realtor
MortgageNewsDaily.com
ConsumerFinancialProtectionBureau.gov
Investopedia.com