Welcome back to the High Performance Agent Podcast. I'm your host, Tina Beliveau, and I am here to answer a really great question that I got in my recent Ask Me Anything series, which came from a friend and seasoned agent named Jill. Her question is, can you share strategies to build value for sellers while listings take longer to sell to keep them engaged and happy instead of anxious and managing seller expectations in a changing and unpredictable market? Boy, what a great question.
This is such a tricky and essential skill set that I was blessed to have the misfortune of walking through in the really big market crash that started in 2008. Tiny snapshot of my story. I got my license in 05.
I graduated college in 2007. My first two years, I was on a real estate team. And then I graduated college, went solo, started building my business from nothing, didn't really have a network yet, didn't have a database, didn't have a strategy, didn't have a lot of confidence, had big dreams, and then the market crashed.
And then people were seriously underwater in their homes. They owed way more than they were worth. Short sales were huge.
Foreclosures were huge. I went on listing appointments left and right with people who could not afford to sell or did not want to take the hit when they sold. And if I did list their properties, it was not easy or quick necessarily.
And I had to create a whole toolbox of skills, systems, and mental strategies and actual tactical strategies to manage that. First things first, kind of a brain dump answer to this question. And Jill has already passed this, and I think most people are.
But the first thing is to accept reality. When the market is softening, it is natural, as a human, for us to have a little bit of denial, to hope that it's just a blip, to hope that it's not going to be that bad or it'll be better tomorrow when interest rates inevitably get... How long have we all been saying, well, when interest rates are better? I've been saying it since the middle of 2022 when they shot up from basically 2.5% to 7% in the course of a couple months. The first thing is to get yourself in reality because we can't get our clients into reality if we're not in reality.
I think we're all there. I think maybe two months ago, I was still in a little bit of denial about Baltimore really starting to slow down, but it's here. The second thing is... This is all a lot of internal work.
Second thing is it's not your fault. You don't make the market. There were some really important thought leaders in my early phase of my career.
I think that this is either a Gary Keller or a Brian Buffini-ism. I don't make the market. My job is to interpret the market.
That's a mindset, but also something we can say to our clients of, you may not like what your house is worth. I'm just here to tell you the truth. I'm here to tell you what the market is doing and empower you to make good business decisions about your property and base them on real information and not a different person who's sitting in front of you just hoping to get your listing or has no idea what they're doing or only sells a few homes a year and hasn't even noticed the market change yet because they haven't done a transaction for the last three months.
For you, it's to know it's not your fault. There's nothing you can do about it except equip people to be in the best possible position. And I think it can feel a little personal when we put a listing on the market and things don't go the way we expected, maybe verbalized and set expectations on the outside of ourselves with our clients, how it was going to go.
It can even be embarrassing. I felt some feelings of embarrassment this spring when our market was starting to shift and I was having some deals fall through, get shaky, not sell right away. It rattled me even though I've been doing this for a long time.
If you feel those feelings, it's normal and it's a sign that you give a shit and that you care and that you care very much and that you want to deliver what you've promised. Those are my mindset tips. Then there is having that confidence of telling people what they need to hear when they don't want to hear it.
There are two things I want to say. The joy and blessing of working a referral based business is there's a lot of trust or transferred trust with a lot of our clientele. They already know that we are the trusted resource and they just need us to tell them what to do.
And even if it's not quite what they were expecting, they just appreciate our expertise and move forward. It's another plug of why it's so great to work referral business and not chase expires and withdrawns where we have to sales script them down into reality. Now, there are still many people that will come to us with a relationship driven business that are going to be in disbelief that the values aren't what they expected.
Maybe it's a Zestimate. Maybe it's a recent sale down the street. Maybe it's the HomeBot you've been sending them.
Sometimes the HomeBot numbers we send are not quite right. I just say, this is an algorithm. It's a tool.
It's a barometer. It's not the be all and end all. HomeBot hasn't been in your house.
HomeBot doesn't know what you've done to your kitchen. HomeBot doesn't know what you've done to your bathrooms. HomeBot doesn't know that you just put an addition on that isn't in the tax records yet.
HomeBot doesn't know that you haven't done anything to your house for 10 years and it's fallen into disrepair. You know what I mean? And even not feeling bad about that, those objections can be difficult. I think working through relationships, these conversations are easier.
It doesn't mean they're easy, but they're easier. I know the person who asked this question has all of this credibility and it's all referral and past clients for her. Her questions probably don't come from the mindset side.
Although I do think sometimes we just can feel... I'll speak for myself. I can feel off my game. When things are flowing, it's easy to feel like a winner.
And when nothing's working, sometimes it's easy for me to feel like a loser and to feel like I'm the only one. I remember asking around in the spring, some other top agents in my market, being, what is going on? And then being, oh yeah, me too. But you would never know that from their social media.
It's just in being vulnerable enough to ask other people what's going on and what are they seeing and all of that good stuff. That's the mindset piece. And when I was a new agent having to build some of that skillset, I was young.
I was not used to having these hard conversations. I didn't always know how to lead people to the logical conclusion. I really had to dig into a lot of materials.
I wouldn't say I had scripts that helped me, but I would say talking points and a couple key ideas that I became confident to communicate to people. One of them being the importance of pricing a property in what I call the sweet spot. The sweet spot is where everything works.
It's where you get one great offer, if not multiples, it's when you're on the market for a relatively brief period of time relative to the market cycle that you're in, where the offers that you're getting are good, where the showing traffic is strong, where everything works. When we price outside of the sweet spot, which is always when you're above the sweet spot, you kind of can't go too low. Although there is a point where you go too low, where I've had, I had a few experiences in the COVID run-up where we priced things conservatively and then we would get 25 offers and there would be a subset of those offers who would never have afforded it for what it was really worth.
That's not a great feeling for the buyer or those buyer agents. That being said, if I'm ever going air pricing too high or too low, it's always going to be too low. I just fully disclose to the client the pros and the cons of that.
The pro list is very long. The con list is very short. I just gave it to you.
Unless you're in a just falling free fall market, which by the way, 08 to 2010, 11 really felt that at times, then pricing low is not always the best strategy, but in the kind of market we're in, at least where I am, it's still a winner. Really explaining to people the concept of the sweet spot. One of my other sayings was you can't unring that bell.
Once a bell is rung, it's rung. You can't stop it or do it over. What I mean by that is we have to come to market at the right price and present it and stage and style and clean and present well.
It's such a common refrain to say, Oh, well, if we start too high, we'll just reduce. That's when I don't say, let me stop you right there. I want people to feel heard.
Essentially I'm, let me stop you right there. What you're saying is what every smart person, that is the logical thought process. I want to affirm for people, the fact that you're thinking that is really normal.
And it's a smart, logical thought. Oh, if I'm a little off, then I'll just adjust. The reality in real estate is you get 80% of your interest, 80 to 90% of your showings and your interest and your serious buyers in the first week.
If you burn all of that interest by starting too high, there is no way to recapture that leverage, that power and that sense of urgency. Can you start higher and adjust? Yes. Is that your choice? Yes.
Do people sometimes do it? Yes. Is it ever in your highest and best interest? No, not unless we're talking maybe ultra luxury stuff that's really hard to price. But if we're talking 80 to 90% of the regular saleable real estate in your market, the price high and adjust later philosophy doesn't work, but you can't just say it doesn't work.
It really helps to explain why it doesn't work. When I give people that concept of we can't unring the bell, if you burn through 90% of your best options and your best buyers, that leaves you with a 10% junk. Oh, and by the way, then we chase the market down.
We're begging people to show, I'm calling, they don't even give feedback. When I do, they tear your house apart. They make lowball offers.
They ask for every inspection, including mold and specialty things that don't have any relevance to your house. They send you a home inspection punch list with 25 things on it. There are so many consequences to giving up your leverage and your power and your leverage and your power resides in pricing right and presenting right.
My job is to advise you on how to do both of those to the best of our mutual availability and you will get the best results. It's proven factually, statistically in the market overall and in my own track record. Now you can hear how confident I am saying this.
I've had so much practice, but also I cannot say things. I cannot recommend things unless I feel convicted in them personally. And because I've done this long enough to feel such a conviction for it.
It is easy for me to say, because I know that it's true. It's not a script. It's not a talking point.
It's not me trying to talk someone into something that is not in their best interest. They feel that from me. There's that confidence.
The best way to get better at this is to just do it and push through these uncomfortable conversations and, or sit in rooms where you can be in on conversations where agents like me are having those pricing conversations and you can see how it's done. There's magic in shadowing and absorbing and seeing how it's done and just saving people from themselves, preventing them from costly mistakes. I think not only do people feel my confidence, but they do feel that I have their best interests at heart.
They know that I have integrity. They've maybe worked with me before or been referred and they, or they read my team's 200 Google reviews and they get it and they just need to hear it, but they need to understand why and not just be glossed over or corrected. I think communication is key.
I think pricing conversations absolutely need to be verbal whenever they get tricky. I love a dream client. Who's, tell me what to do.
Send me the paperwork, whatever. Then I don't always explain exactly what I'm up to. I just give them a high level and then walk them through it as it happens.
But when people need to be coached into the right decisions, that is where I come from. This market is freaking confusing. Comps are all over the map.
It's weird. This market necessitates more work. It's also less fun.
Cause everything you're, I feel pricing listings feels more of a mental burden when there's more uncertainty. It's not just looking at the comps. It's, how old are they? Exactly, are they spring comps? Are they last winter comps? Are they right now looking at active competition in inventory? What's coming soon? Is it going to be competing with us? What's under contract right now? Can I call those agents and get a clue of how close their price was to list? Can I discern how close it was based on the days on market? All of that goes into a really good pricing strategy.
It's a lot of work upfront to have everything feel easy later. I explained that to the client too. It's a lot of work on them to prep, or at least let me schedule and coordinate and have them pay for that prep.
It's a lot of work for me to come up with a winning pricing strategy. It's, do it right once and everything works. Do it wrong, sloppy, or a little lazy or big picture, or a little afraid to tell them what they don't want to hear.
Then it doesn't work. The pricing piece is essential. But even then things can take a while.
I've had some properties this year that sat on the market and I'm, oh my gosh, we need to reduce. Then we get a good offer weeks in. I can think of two properties where I got full price offers at about 14 days on market, where I was gearing up to have the price reduction chitty chat with the clients.
I have to admit both of those buyers agents, I thought to myself, that is crazy that you didn't call and ask me and discern the motivation level. Those people absolutely could have come in 10 to 20,000 under list and gotten a counter from us. Just also a tip on the buy side, that's not always the right thing to do.
Sometimes bidding wars do crop up out of nowhere weeks later. It's frustrating on the buy side. It's happening right now with a listing of ours, something quite stale.
We have multiple offers out of nowhere after things being weird and just kind of stuck with it and stuck with it. I am a proponent of making price adjustments. I think it makes sense a lot of the time, but not to be too hasty either.
That's the price part. Before it comes to market, the other things that I do are I set expectations about what we're going to do pertaining to price and what you're going to expect from me communication wise and also marketing wise.
And it's documented, written, and reiterated over and over. That's where the systems that I give people in the Academy, that's the backbone of what I do. It's the unseen part that really keeps people feeling clear and comfortable with what is happening.
I have a special Beliveau Group specific addendum in our listing contracts. It's literally called our seller expectations addendum. It sets expectations on all the problems that come up when a house doesn't sell in the first two or three days. People immediately freak out understandably because it's not a good feeling when you already feel you're starting on the wrong foot with selling your home.
I cover things like not every agent gives feedback. We reach out a bunch, but expect feedback 70% of the time. Some people do not respond. No feedback generally means no interest. If there is interest, they will call me or they will submit an offer. That helps people not jump down my throat about feedback.
When a house is sitting on the market, they're, where's the feedback? When a house is sitting, I work even harder to get feedback. I call, I text, I really try to reach the people and get something because even the littlest bits of effort and communication and feedback make our clients feel so much better. It shows you give a crap and that you are doing something. After about a week, they're, what are you doing?
Another big thing that comes up is, can you do another open house? You know how it is when you're a successful agent. We know the first weekend gets all the traffic. Every open after that it's the neighbor, it's nobody, it's two people. It's the person who's shopping three years from now. It's generally not your serious buyers.
We set an expectation. We do an open house once at the beginning and we do everything big at the beginning. If we don't have offers in the first two weeks, we might need to make an adjustment. Then we do make every effort to always do an open house right after any price adjustments to give it that additional push. I will say we're seeing better traffic at our opens in the year. It's crazy. It's been a year now since NAR made all of the changes. There's more unrepresented buyers coming. We're picking up buyers more often. People are using open houses to shop agents. They are more worthwhile. I'm just not convinced that they necessarily sell the house.
We're also getting more sign calls than ever, unrepresented buyers reaching out about our listings. It's a great time to be a listing agent in many ways, especially from the side of grabbing leads from both sides of things. That seller addendum covers the showing feedback issue, the open house issue. It lays out what we do and don't do for marketing. It lays out what we do and don't do for staging. Then it also sets the tone that it literally says: we know our listing and marketing systems are proven. The only thing we're testing when we put the house to market is the price, because everything else we do works. We've sold 2000 homes. We know that all of that works. The only variable is the market and the price that we put for your home. In the first 14 days, we will have data to tell us if we are priced right. The data is how many inquiries, how many showings scheduled, how many showings completed, how many offers. Then there's also the data of the feedback and what people say. There's the quantitative and the qualitative. That's the word I was searching for.
What we say is by 14 days, we usually have enough data to know that we're priced right. Within 14 days, we should have had at least 10 showings and one offer. If we have 10 or more showings and no offers, usually a sign we're overpriced unless something unusual is happening with condition or really weird market things. Say there is a big interest rate hike or COVID started, big things. There's the seasonal part too of the summer sluggishness. I always, in my market, discourage people from listing in August. I think it's a very tough time to get listings sold. I really push people to wait till after Labor Day. There's the seasonal effect too. If everything is as it should be, I also don't like to go active on holiday weekends. I think it's easy to lose sight of that and sellers not get that and really, again, focus on setting them up for success.
This addendum that they sign — some people don't read it, but a lot do, especially your type A people who are often the people that blow you up about every last detail — sets expectations. Then when you sign a listing contract with us, we send you a weekly email walking you through the prep process because we're very hands-on with most of our listings: recommending work, referring contractors, coordinating the contractors, sometimes checking on the work in conjunction with our clients, staging, getting everything together. That takes a while. You get a weekly email from us breaking down what's happening and when.
Because of our communication, our clients feel so much trust and comfort with us. They're less likely to have questions of, what are you doing? and Why haven't I heard from you? Even though the communication isn't always about how the house is performing with getting it sold, there's such a foundation of trust. Our admin sends this email out. It's called the milestone update. It goes out every single week, like a clock, for all listings in the prep and active process. Then everything under contract, buy and sell side.
In the run-up to going active, there is verbiage in that email template reminding them that we expect 10 showings and one offer in the first two weeks. That is our target, if not better. If we are not on target for that, we will be in touch. Then once we go active, there is a communication cadence that I'll never forget. Deborah White Rice — such a fun last name — she was my Buffini coach way back in the day, a long time ago. This was in probably 2013 or 2014. I was starting to handle a lot more listings at once. The market was still kind of weak and not everything was selling and I was struggling mentally. It was not fun. It was not a good time. She said, Tina, you need to call your active sellers every single week and proactively touch base with them on the same day of the week, even though it's your least favorite call, your least favorite thing. Make that call and use that call to tell them everything that's going on. Tell them everything you've been doing, all that unseen labor and coordinating and communicating that may have happened behind the scenes that you didn't loop them in on. Then continue to work on price adjustments. When you talk about it every Tuesday — Tuesday became the day, by the way — you will get better at this. Also, people will start to suggest the price reduction to you. I adopted that advice. It was some of the best advice I ever got.
So what we have is a cascade of updates to our clients when they're active. When they're sitting, there's enough happening that they're hearing from me and my team a lot. They may not be happy if it's taking a while, but the cadence is there. On Monday, there's an auto email that we set up in the MLS, sending them a recap of everything active, under contract, and sold in the last week in their area and the price band that we're in. It's a quick check of competition and comps and I'm copied on it. I look at it every week and then I don't have to go check what's happening because it's set up right. They can look at that and see the data, see what's happening.
My admin also makes sure to do a sweep of getting any feedback from weekend showings that was not submitted. She runs through and calls and texts everybody, tries to get additional feedback, enters that in ShowingTime, that comes through. That is all the material for my Tuesday call where I call them and recap everything. This is what's going on. We've had a lot of showings. I've had one inquiry, maybe an offer. I think we're good. If everything peters out and this time next week it's very quiet, we might need to talk about the price, but don't worry about that. I think we're okay right now. That's the, things are going pretty well dialogue. If things aren't going so great, I say, you know what, we might need to make a pivot next week. I just want to put this on your radar. You don't need to decide. By the way, this is your decision, but if we're not on target for the level of interest, we probably need to make an adjustment. I plant the seed. The following week, the conversation is so much easier because they're not blindsided. They've had time to process. They're often ready to do it or they're not ready and they're, please, can we wait one more week? I'm, okay, yeah, let's talk next week. I'm not going to hit you over the head with a hammer on this. Then we get to it then. If they just won't reduce, then I know where they stand. Then I do my best and maybe look back at why I took that listing in the first place or what happened in my analysis. What can I learn from this? What can I do better next time? How can I push this? Where can I go some extra miles with my marketing and at least put even more effort in, even though if you're not priced right, it tends to not work.
That call is on Tuesday. Then they get the weekly milestone update from Melissa every Wednesday as well, just breaking down what's going on. So there are two emails and one call a week. It's heavy work. It's not that much work, but it's a commitment. That level of communication and service is night and day. Think about whenever you've hired someone to do something for you that was expensive and important. If the communication was anything but spot on, if they didn't deliver what they promised when they said they would, if they didn't return messages in a timely fashion, if they forgot to loop back with you on something you asked for, if you just don't hear from them, you wonder what are they doing? This has happened to me with contractors. It's happened to me with interior designers I've hired. It happened with someone I hired to design a basement renovation for me. The level of rage. I'm type A, I'm big on communication. I'm not perfect. I don't always communicate well, but I do try to have systems and be really aware of how I make people feel. The rage that I feel when people make a promise and do not deliver is unmatched.
I think people feel more upset with listing agents and their communication than what's actually happening with the market a lot of the time. A, because it's easier to project onto a person, but B, because they are trusting us with their asset. They are eventually paying us a very large sum of money for our work.
As agents, we know that. When it's not going well, it's natural to want to hide and not be in the hot seat and not have the uncomfortable conversations. But it's, have one uncomfortable chat once a week or now to not have someone hate you or fire you or be really dissatisfied and have a bad vibe every single time you interact all the way to the end.
That's how I handle it from mindset all the way through to the active listing phase. Then I just hammer away at the client. If we really need to change the price, I stay patient if we just need to stay the course. I up my Instagram marketing for the house. I try to get agents in my brokerage to host extra open houses if that's something the client really values. I don't promise it, but I hustle for it. If I think I'm way off and I can't understand why, I reach out to other agents and get their input. If there are other active listings that are just like mine in the same price bracket and area, I'll call the other agents and be, what's going on with yours? and just get insight. Then I share that back with the client. They love knowing that you're doing something. A lot of other agents are happy to collaborate and commiserate and share what they're doing. Maybe you set up a day where all the houses are open at the same time. It's work and it's what we should be doing. Ideally, you don't need to unring the bell and do it again. Ideally, we get in the sweet spot, do it all right from the beginning.
I think I'll end with this. One of the other things that has helped me help my clients agree to price their properties correctly is painting the picture of what I just described to you, the pain they will feel and endure when they don't price right. I tell them a story about a specific client or, here's what's going to happen. We're only going to, we may only have a handful of showings. People are going to pick the house apart. I'm going to be calling you every Tuesday, suggesting a price drop. We're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing that. You're going to pay your mortgage for three extra months. By my math, that's $8,000 out of your pocket while we wait for this. Those are some of the consequences. When people really can, when you take them to the pain and the emotion versus the logic, that often helps them get it. They say, I don't want to feel that way. I don't want it to go that way. Let me just do what Tina said.
Then we hope that the market performs the way it should, or we expect it to. Sometimes it doesn't. That's where I go back to my own mantra that I think is a Gary Kellerism. I don't make the market. I just interpret the market. Based on the reality of what's happening, here's the next best step we can take, here's the next right thing we can do to rectify this and deal with the market. I think being able to explain to clients the macro dynamics of our political climate, which is feeding feelings of economic instability, of persistent inflation and the high cost of living, of persistent high interest rates. People go, oh yeah, I get that. That is what's happening. I think we all know that, but sometimes people just need to be reminded of what is contributing to what is happening. Then it's, what are you going to do about it? You've got to have an answer for that. Whether that's, I'm emailing the top 25 agents that have all brought buyers to this market in the last few months, or whatever it is that you can do to get that listing in front of the right people. Maybe it's a broker tour. Maybe it's a neighbor happy hour, getting people in. Maybe it's having a price opinion where you bring three trusted agents and get their feedback and have a group of people by proxy report to your client that they're overpriced. I also do price opinions before going active that helps me price difficult properties.
I'm going to wrap it up. That was 30 minutes of an answer to Jill's question, but I hope anyone listening to this finds value. I have an ask me anything form. If you want me to answer something in podcast form, fill out the form, shoot me a DM. You can find me at highperformanceagent.com and I'll talk to you soon.
