Mark Tauber Real Estate

Mark Tauber Real Estate Mark Tauber is an Associate Broker with Coldwell Banker in Burlingame. Since 2001, Mark has been he Clients First!

As a Bay Area real estate broker with years of experience, it is my goal to bring interested buyers and sellers together to find a perfect match. I have extensive experience handling property transactions in Burlingame, Hillsborough, San Mateo, and other upscale areas on the Peninsula. Buying a home is one of the most important decisions you will ever make, and I am committed to providing my clients with the information, expertise, and personalized service that they deserve.

There is a moment in almost every listing appointment where the conversation stops being about the house.The seller has ...
09/04/2026

There is a moment in almost every listing appointment where the conversation stops being about the house.

The seller has a number in their head. It is usually the sale price minus the mortgage payoff, and it is usually wrong by more than they expect. That gap is the net sheet, and I would much rather you see it at the beginning than at the closing table.

The one that catches San Mateo County sellers hardest is transfer tax, because here it can be two taxes rather than one. There is a county rate that applies everywhere, and property inside the City of San Mateo carries an additional city conveyance tax on top of it. The same house a few minutes away in Burlingame, Belmont or San Carlos carries only the county piece. That is a real difference in real money decided by which side of a city line you sit on, and it belongs in your plan rather than on your closing statement.

Then there are the credits. Repair credits, closing cost credits, the rent back you agreed to. These get negotiated late, after you have mentally banked a number, which is exactly why I order inspections before we launch. Finding an issue before the market does means you decide whether to fix it, disclose it, or price it. Finding it during escrow means the buyer decides.

The full breakdown, with the rates and the rest of the line items, is in the article. Link in the comments.

This is general information about how sales here are customarily structured, not tax or legal advice. Confirm the current rate for your specific city with your escrow officer, because city rates change by ballot measure.

Sellers, what was the line item that surprised you most on your closing statement?

The call almost always comes in the same order. Someone found the house, offers are due Tuesday, and they are standing i...
09/03/2026

The call almost always comes in the same order. Someone found the house, offers are due Tuesday, and they are standing in the home they still own.

That is the sell first or buy first question, and on the Peninsula it is not really a financing question. It is a leverage question.

There are three ways through it and each one sends you a different bill. Sell first and negotiate a rent back, which makes you a clean non contingent buyer but starts a clock. Buy first with bridge financing or a home equity line, which only works if your income and equity genuinely support carrying two, and which requires the line to be open before the house is listed. Or write the contingent offer, and understand that a listing agent reading it next to a clean one does not read the contingency as a detail. They read it as risk.

None of the three is wrong. The families who do well are not the ones who guessed right. They are the ones who decided which path they were on before they fell in love with a house.

I wrote out what each route actually costs, what each one signals to the other side of the table, and the four questions that usually settle it. Link in the comments.

If you have already been through this, I would like to hear which way you went, and whether you would do it the same way again.

09/02/2026

Here's something that seems irrational until you think about it from the buyer's side.

A buyer walking through a house for fifteen minutes cannot inspect the roof, the sewer lateral, or the electrical panel. They have no way to assess any of the expensive things. So they do what people always do with incomplete information: they look for proxies.

A loose door handle isn't really about the handle. Yellowed switch plates aren't about the switch plates. They read as evidence about everything the buyer can't see, and the conclusion they lead to is "what else did they not deal with."

That's why a weekend and a few hundred dollars can move the read on a house further than a much larger project does. You're not improving the house. You're removing the evidence that argues against it.

09/02/2026

People compare Millbrae against Burlingame on a spreadsheet and end up comparing two averages that describe nobody's actual house.

Millbrae is really four markets sitting inside one zip code. The Highlands are above the noise and trade on view and quiet. The Meadows trade on flat streets and lot size. The Green Hills side trades on schools and proximity. And the transit village near the BART and Caltrain station trades on a commute that almost nowhere else on the Peninsula can match.

Those aren't variations of the same market. They're four different ones that happen to share a postcode.

The SFO flight path doesn't follow city lines either. It changes block to block, which is one of the few things you genuinely cannot renovate your way out of.

Which side of town did you end up on?

People research a neighborhood on paper and then decide with their feet, and the two rarely agree.The things that end up...
09/01/2026

People research a neighborhood on paper and then decide with their feet, and the two rarely agree.

The things that end up mattering are usually the ones you can't look up. Which direction the fog comes in on your block. Whether the quiet street you fell for turns into a commuter cut-through at 5:30 on a weekday. How far the actual front door is from the actual train platform, rather than how far the city center is.

Rankings and score sites are a reasonable place to start a search and a poor place to end one. They're built from city-level data, and city level is exactly the resolution at which the Peninsula stops making sense. Millbrae alone is four different markets inside one zip code.

I've put the method I'd actually use into one guide, along with the town-by-town breakdowns. Link in the comments.

08/31/2026

Somebody reads that homes in San Mateo County are selling quickly and assumes it means theirs will.

A median tells you about the middle of the market. It doesn't tell you anything about your particular house on your particular street.

What I'm still seeing is buyers differentiating sharply between homes that are properly prepared and priced and the ones that aren't. Two houses on the same block, similar size, similar vintage, can behave completely differently. The difference is almost always preparation and the number you started at.

So read a median the way you'd read a weather average. It describes the conditions. It doesn't predict your day.

08/28/2026

Ask most people what holds up the sale of a house after someone dies and they'll say the family couldn't agree on price.

In practice that's rarely what does it. What holds it up is the logistics nobody was assigned.

Forty years of belongings have to be sorted before a photographer can walk in. The estate sale companies worth using book out weeks ahead. There's deferred maintenance nobody has looked at since well before the owner got ill. None of that is a disagreement. It's just work with no name attached to it.

Pricing a house takes an afternoon. Clearing one takes a season. Families are almost always surprised by which of those two is the bottleneck.

If you've been through settling a parent's estate, what actually took the longest?

08/28/2026

This is the part of my process I get argued with about most, including by other agents.

I don't automatically set an offer date. Most agents pick one before they have any real idea what buyer demand looks like, usually because a date on the calendar feels organized and reassuring. I don't work that way. The market tells me when it's ready, not the calendar.

After roughly five to nine days I have an actual count of how many buyers intend to write. That's the point at which setting a date means something.

And I won't look at a preemptive offer. If one arrives before I've set a date, accepting it ends the process before the process has done its job. One buyer negotiating with one seller is a negotiation. Several buyers competing for the same house is leverage, and leverage is the thing you're actually paying an agent to create.

Price doesn't create leverage. Competition creates leverage.That sentence is doing most of the work in how I run a listi...
08/27/2026

Price doesn't create leverage. Competition creates leverage.

That sentence is doing most of the work in how I run a listing, and it's why the sequence I use looks different from what a lot of sellers expect. The disclosure package is finished before the first open house weekend rather than after. It goes only to agents whose buyers actually toured and asked for it, never blanket-emailed and never posted to the MLS. And I don't set an offer date until the market has told me what demand actually looks like.

Every one of those choices is about the same thing: building a room where buyers compete, instead of negotiating with whoever shows up first.

I wrote the whole sequence out, in order, including the two places where I do something most agents don't. Link in the comments.

08/27/2026

Almost every listing appointment starts the same way. The seller asks how fast we can get an offer, and I usually tell them in the first ten minutes that it's the wrong question.

Here's what actually happens before anyone walks through the door. The full disclosure package is finished before the first open house weekend, which I call Showtime. Not started. Finished.

The reasoning is simple enough. Informed buyers write stronger offers. Somebody who has read the inspection reports and the preliminary title before they write isn't going to discover something in week two and come back asking for a credit. They price the risk into the offer up front, which is where it belongs.

There's a second benefit that nobody talks about. Getting the package done early forces all the unglamorous work forward. Inspections get booked, reports come back, and anything that needs attention surfaces while there's still time to do something about it.

What did you actually know about the house before you wrote your offer?

Address

1427 Chapin Avenue
Burlingame, CA
94010

Telephone

+16505769565

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Mark Tauber Real Estate posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Mark Tauber Real Estate:

Shortcuts

Share

Category