Recommend someone local.

This whole site is a small labor of love — an avocation, not a business — and this page is one of its simplest, most neighborly corners: a place to pass a good name along.

How good work gets found up here

La Habra Heights looks after its own, even when the houses sit acres apart. Up here you don’t lean over a shared fence — you notice the one property down the road that always looks right and you ask who keeps it that way, or a good name comes up over coffee, after church, in a phone call between neighbors who’ve come to trust each other. The best work gets found the way the best of anything gets found on this hillside: someone who’s earned your trust says, you’ve got to call the people I use. So if a contractor, a landscaper, a tree trimmer, a housekeeper, a pool service, a septic company, a Realtor — anyone at all — has given you stellar service and earned your trust, I’d like to hear about it. Good work deserves to be said out loud, and the people who do it deserve the credit.

What I’m already working from

It may help to know what I’m already working from. After decades up here, I keep a short, quiet list of people I’ve used, watched work, and trust enough to put my own name behind — landscapers and concrete finishers, painters and carpenters, the rare handyman who actually shows up, decluttering people who can make a full house breathe again, pool and septic services. For the harder hillside questions there are structural and civil engineers, and the geotechnical engineers who read the soil when a slope or a wall calls for it. And yes — Realtors, too.

A word about Realtors

Realtors are worth a word of their own, because I’d genuinely like to know the good ones. I’ve reached out to dozens who work La Habra Heights and had good conversations with many of them — some have real specialties that make them exactly right for a particular property. A few of the names whose glossy cards arrive in the mailbox each month, with their tallies of homes sold and millions done up here, simply haven’t wanted to talk. I don’t read anything unkind into that — they may be too busy selling houses to take the call — though I’ll admit it strikes me as a little odd, since I’m asked all the time which Realtor to recommend, and the heaviest advertisers are often the quietest to reply.

And this is where a recommendation is sometimes less about a name than about a question worth asking. Are the biggest advertisers the best Realtors for you? Maybe — it honestly depends on your home and who its buyer is. If yours is a fairly ordinary Heights home to list, a strong producer may be exactly right.

When you already have a buyer in mind

But if you already have a buyer in mind — if the person who wants your home is someone you know — I’d think twice before handing the whole thing over for a serious commission. A sale like that can often be done for a few thousand dollars rather than a percentage, handled by a real estate attorney working from the same standard forms a Realtor would use. The attorneys I’d point you to are both licensed real estate brokers and real estate lawyers themselves, many for the better part of forty years — and they do the deal as your lawyer, because that is the stronger, more secure transaction for you, their client. The work they prepare on your behalf can carry the buyer’s side as well; your buyer may not need an attorney of their own for the heavy lifting, perhaps only an hour of one’s time to read the papers over. None of that is legal advice — it’s one neighbor’s read after a long time watching these deals go by — and any attorney I send you to will tell you plainly what your own situation actually needs.

Send a good name along

All of these are people I’ve recommended for years, some for decades. But the list is never finished, and that’s the whole point of this page. So if someone has been outstanding for you — stellar, the kind you tell everyone about — tell me. Maybe I can help a good contractor, a fine professional, or a favorite service earn the next neighbor’s trust.