05/05/2026
Notes from the field
The Walkthrough
It's the Tuesday before closing. The deal is done — or at least, everyone has agreed that it's done. Contracts signed, mortgage committed, moving trucks mentally booked. You can feel the finish line.
Then the final walkthrough happens.
I've done enough of these to know that something shifts in a buyer in the final days before closing. The excitement that carried them through months of searching, offers, negotiations, and inspections quietly gives way to something else. Scrutiny. Sometimes anxiety. Occasionally, something that looks a lot like buyer's remorse wearing a clipboard.
New York has a particular energy to it in these moments. There's always traffic outside, always a siren somewhere, always the ambient pressure of the city reminding everyone that time and money are the same thing here. And in that pressure, small things become large things very quickly.
A light switch that doesn't respond. A window that resists. The faint rattle of a washing machine that nobody noticed in October but suddenly sounds like a turbine engine in May.
I learned early in my career that the worst place to discover any of this is standing in the apartment with both agents, a buyer holding their phone like it's a weapon, and a closing scheduled for 10am the next morning.
So I stopped discovering things then.
Before any final walkthrough I'm representing, I go in myself. Quietly, without fanfare — usually with the seller or the building super, sometimes alone. I work through the apartment the way a buyer's agent will, except I'm not looking for leverage. I'm looking for anything that could become a conversation I don't want to have the day before closing.
Every outlet gets tested. Every light switch. The oven ignites, the dishwasher runs, the washing machine completes a cycle. I check water pressure at every faucet, flush every toilet, open every window. I look for the smoke detector, the carbon monoxide alarm — are they mounted, are they blinking, do they have batteries. These are not dramatic things. They are Tuesday things. But in a deal worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, a missing smoke detector battery can feel, to the wrong buyer on the wrong day, like a reason to pause.
And a pause, in New York real estate, has a cost.
Sometimes something genuinely can't be fixed in time. A dishwasher that's given its last cycle. A window mechanism that needs a part on backorder. In those cases, I'd rather put a credit on the table myself — proactively, cleanly — than have it extracted from us at the closing table like a negotiation nobody planned for. The difference between offering and conceding is everything. One feels like professionalism. The other feels like defeat.
But most of the time, the issues are small. Fixable. A $40 part. A 20-minute visit from the super. A working oven that just needed someone to check it.
What I'm really doing in that pre-walkthrough is removing the ammunition. Not because buyers are adversaries — they're not. But because uncertainty makes people reach for control, and in a city that never stops moving, the closing table is one of the last places anyone feels like they have any. My job is to make sure they walk in with nothing to find.
The deal closes. The keys change hands. The city moves on.
That's how it's supposed to go.
