About Scott

About Scott Selleck

A listing is almost never a financial decision that happens to involve a house. It is a life decision that happens to involve money.

That is the difference between how I work and how most of this business is organized. I am Scott Selleck, founder of The Selleck Group at KW City Views Realty in Fort Lee. I have been licensed since 1993, I have closed over 500 transactions across Bergen and Hudson Counties, and the ones I still talk about are the families who called back a decade later.

Where I learned this

My mother, Connie Selleck, sold wigs out of our basement before she opened a clothing consignment storefront on Main Street in Fort Lee and later moved to a larger retail space in Palisades Park called Connie's Place. She ran that business for thirty-three years. Women came in on Saturdays with wine and bread and stayed to talk about their families, their health, their marriages. By the end it was not really a wig shop. It was a community built inside four walls.

That is where I learned what a service business actually is. It is not just the transaction. It is the room you make for people.

What that looks like in a transaction

I call it strategic empathy, and it is a practice rather than a personality claim. Four things, every time.

I slow the pace instead of pushing it. I name the emotional thing out loud so it is not sitting under the table unspoken. I tell you the part you will not want to hear before you hear it from someone else. And I give you room to arrive at the decision yourself, which is the one thing a person in transition almost never gets.

A widow selling the home where she raised four children is not comparing price per square foot. She is deciding whether she is allowed to let it go. If I treat that as a pricing conversation, I have already failed her.

The shortest version of the standard is this: bring the family through the move, do not score the point.

Why there is a team

Clients I helped buy a house in the 1990s started calling to sell it. Then their children started calling. Those calls were not going to a brokerage. They were going to a name, and one person can only be in one room at a time.

The Selleck Group exists so that the relationship does not depend on my calendar.

I hire for temperament first and skill second, because skill can be taught and temperament cannot. I would rather train a calm person on contracts than try to calm down a trained one. The standard holds when I am not in the room because it is written down, not felt. We work from a documented process covering how a listing gets prepared, what gets verified before it goes live, and what a client hears and when. Compliance is built into the steps rather than treated as a final check. When something goes wrong, we own it first and fix it second.

New Jersey to Florida

I hold a Florida license through Keller Williams Boca Raton Realty, and I hold it for a specific reason. The New Jersey to Florida move tends to fail in the seams between two agents who each know only one end of it. One knows your house. The other knows the destination. Neither one owns the part in the middle, which is where the money and the timing actually live.

The NJ to FL Transition Plan closes that seam. I walk you through the full ledger before anyone gets excited about the sale price: cost of living, taxes, insurance, and the town-by-town differences that do not show up until you are already committed.

Florida has no state income tax. Homeowners insurance is a materially larger line item than most Bergen County owners are budgeting for, and I do not quote a number for it, because cost varies by property, elevation, roof age, construction type, and carrier. I send you to a licensed Florida insurance agent for a quote on the actual property rather than an average that will not hold.

The so-called New Jersey exit tax is not an additional tax. It is an estimated income tax payment withheld at closing under the state's GIT/REP rules, credited against what you actually owe New Jersey, and refunded in whole or in part when you file.

What I watch that most listings do not show you

Carrying cost has replaced purchase price as the deciding variable, and most people are still shopping the old way.

What determines affordability now is the recurring number: insurance, taxes, assessments, association fees, and in Florida, deductible structure. Two homes at the same price can run several hundred dollars a month apart. In a Bergen County condo or co-op, the association line can move more than the mortgage rate does.

Two condominiums can carry the same asking price and the same square footage and cost entirely different amounts to own. One has a funded reserve and a facade project already paid for. The other is heading into an assessment nobody has voted on yet. The listing sheet will not tell you which is which. That answer lives in the minutes, the reserve study, and a phone call to someone who knows the building. Confirm reserve status, pending assessments, and financing eligibility with the association and your own lender before you rely on any number, because those conditions change without notice and vary project by project.

Where technology helps and where it does not

I train on new tools every week, and I built an AI assistant on my own body of knowledge, labeled plainly as AI, so a question about a Bergen County town or the Florida transition can get answered at eleven at night without waiting for me.

What automation extends is reach. What it cannot do is sit across a kitchen table and read a marriage. It cannot tell you that the unit on the third floor faces the ramp and the one on the fifth does not. It cannot tell you which seller will move on price and which one will dig in because an offer felt disrespectful.

AI knows the map. I know the street.

Where I work

Bergen County and Hudson County, New Jersey: Fort Lee, Leonia, Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Englewood, Tenafly, North Bergen, Palisades Park, West New York, Weehawken, Guttenberg.

Florida through Keller Williams Boca Raton Realty.

Start here

If you are thinking about a move, the useful first conversation is not about your house. It is about what you are actually trying to do next.

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