Virginia · Maryland · Washington DC
Every client I have was sent by someone who trusted me. That's the whole business, and it only works if I get it right every time. Start wherever you are.
John Pham · The Topaz Group at Spring Hill Real Estate · Licensed in VA, MD & DC
01
First home or fifth. Real MLS alerts, honest opinions on every house, and no pressure to move before you're ready.
How it works →02
What your home is actually worth, built from closed sales rather than an algorithm's guess at it.
Get your range →03
The homebuyer's guide. Sixteen pages on what actually happens, in the order it happens. No form in front of it.
Open the guide →If you're buying
Most first-time buyers I meet are worried they'll look uninformed. Here's the whole sequence so you don't have to be.
Thirty minutes. What you're trying to do, what you're worried about, what your timeline actually looks like. No pressure to sign anything, and no obligation on either side.
Not a rough guess from a website. An actual pre-approval tells you your ceiling, your monthly payment, and what closing costs will run. Everything after this depends on it.
Fairfax is big and the school pyramids don't follow the town lines. We figure out which areas fit your number and your commute before we spend Saturdays looking at houses.
The job early on is elimination, not falling in love. I'll tell you what's wrong with a house as readily as what's right, including the things that cost money later.
Price is one of maybe six things that decide whether an offer wins. Terms, timelines and contingencies do the rest. This is the part I'm certified in and the part that earns my side of it.
Inspection, appraisal, financing, walkthrough, settlement. Roughly thirty days of deadlines where the main risk is somebody dropping a ball. Coming out of IT, this is the part I'm built for.
Zillow and Redfin pull from the MLS on a delay and their filters are blunt. I can set criteria they can't: a specific school pyramid, particular streets, an HOA fee ceiling, townhouse but not backing to a main road. And I see status changes when they happen.
Tell me what you're hunting for and I'll set it up by hand. No call required, and you can tell me to stop any time.
Or book a 30 minute callFree, no email required
Sixteen pages on what actually happens and in what order. Contingencies, what things cost, how appraisals work, what to ask for after an inspection, and the questions people are embarrassed to ask. Download it and read it on your own time.
Download the guide (PDF)If you're selling
Zillow runs an algorithm across public records. It doesn't know your kitchen was redone, that you back to trees, or what the last three comparable sales on your street actually closed at after concessions. I pull the real data and go through it by hand.
I'll email it within a couple of business days. No obligation, no drip campaign, and I'm the only person who sees what you send.
Free, no email required
Fourteen pages on what it costs, what it's worth and when to go. What actually comes out of the sale price, which repairs return money and which don't, why the first two weeks decide the outcome, and the HOA packet that delays more settlements than anything else. Download it and read it on your own time.
Download the guide (PDF)Don't take my word for it
Excerpts. Every one of them is at the links below, in full.
What working together looks like
Most of what agents promise is impossible to check. These four are specific enough that you'll know within a few weeks whether I meant them.
01
Not just the light in the kitchen. The grading that sends water toward the foundation, the HVAC that's fifteen years old, the addition that doesn't look permitted. You'll hear it while you can still walk away.
02
Sometimes the honest answer is that you should wait six months, pay down a card, or keep renting while you save. You'll get that answer even when it costs me the deal.
03
This industry runs on jargon and most of it is unnecessary. If I explain something and it doesn't land, that's my failure, not yours. Ask me again. Ask me four times.
04
Some agents win your business and then pass you to a junior member. You'll have my number and I'm the one who picks up. That's a limit on how many clients I take, which is the point.
About
I'm a member of NVAR's Top Producers Club, which recognizes the top 10% of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors. I've been named a Rising Star by NOVA Real Producers and one of Virginia's Top 10 Most Trusted Agents.
I started in 2019 at Westgate, a small boutique brokerage, and that's where the foundation got built. On a small team nobody hands your client to anyone else, so you learn to be attentive because there's nowhere for the work to go but back to you. I later moved to Real Broker for the technology and the national network, and what I learned there is that the bigger a platform gets, the further it sits from the neighborhood. Spring Hill Real Estate is the combination I was actually after: a strong local brokerage with real community presence, and enough room to give clients the attention a boutique gives them.
I work consultatively rather than transactionally. Most of what I do is explain things, and you'll get the long version of anything you're about to sign. I'll tell you what's wrong with a house while you can still walk away, and I'll tell you when the timing is wrong. Nearly all of my business comes from referrals, which is the only real measure of whether that approach works.
My wife Paola and I run The Topaz Group together. Outside of work I golf, and I snowboard in the winter.
RENE certified negotiation expert · Licensed in Virginia, Maryland and DC · $10.7M closed in 2025, $10.6M in 2024
No pressure version
Plenty of people aren't ready to book thirty minutes with a realtor, and that's fair. Send the question instead. I answer these myself, usually same day. You won't get dropped into an automated email sequence or handed to somebody else, and if it's the kind of question that's easier on the phone, I'll say so rather than typing four paragraphs.
Or if you'd rather just talk: (717) 829-8314
