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Quick one this week.
I came across an article of why clients give one star reviews for real estate agents. Not opinions, actual verbatim complaints from sellers after their listing ended. I expected price or marketing to be the theme. It was not. Almost every single one said some version of the same thing:
“I was in the dark. No updates. No response. I did not know what was happening with my own home”.
Here’s how that plays out at three levels.
First level: the direct fact.
Days on market across the Front Range have stretched out compared to a few years ago. In 2020 you could list a home and have offers within hours.
That is not today’s market. Homes sit longer, price reductions are more common, and listings get pulled and relisted with a different agent more often than people realize.
Second level: what that fact causes. Longer time on market means more silence, because there is simply less news to report week to week. And that is exactly the window where most agents go quiet instead of communicating more. Silence during a slow stretch is where a seller’s confidence actually breaks, not during the fast, easy weeks.
Third level: the downstream effect nobody connects back to the original cause. A seller who feels abandoned during a quiet month does not just get anxious, they act on it. Sometimes, they pressure for a price cut that may not be warranted. Sometimes they take on a minor project that brings on more trouble than its worth.
And sometimes, they fire an agent who was actually doing everything right, simply because they had no visibility into the work.
The home relists, sits longer overall, and the whole market absorbs a little more of that “agents are unresponsive”reputation, which makes every seller a bit more anxious going into their next listing.
And BELIEVE ME, I get the agents are unresponsive thing. Unscientifically, I would say I get callbacks from agents in the 40% range.
As an industry, I believe real estate agents are the worst, the absolute worst at returning calls.
There’s a reason why 10% do 90% of the transactions, or thereabouts.
The challenge for anyone selling a home in this market: your agent’s silence is not neutral, it compounds.
The agents who keep listings and avoid unnecessary price panic are the ones who over communicate especially when the news is boring.
“No new showings this week, here is what we’re doing about it” beats silence every time.
The part that doesn’t make it into most agents’ updates is what happens after the showing.
Anyone can tell you “we had five showings this week.” That’s just a number. The real work is in the feedback. If we get five showings and no real feedback, that’s not automatically a pricing challenge, that might be a repositioning challenge, or a remarks challenge, or something as small as a room that’s staged wrong or a garden that needs weeding. Every listing is different, and the fix is different every time.
Or, “Mr. Seller, remember when we talked about how it’s imperative that your dog is crated outside and not inside during showings”.
There’s a reason, I don’t just make this shit up, and the buyer or the agent felt uncomfortable talking about your pets, so they toured, left, and moved on.
That is not helpful to us.
I used to own a boat, and I’m not too handy, nor did I have time to work on it. For two years, when I needed a problem diagnosed, I’d have the guy look at it, he’d say
It’s the forticier-gambron, the part was 89$, labor was $215, and now it’s running fine.
Except when I was 12 miles offshore the next weekend, it wasn’t running fine, and I was glad I had towing insurance.
Bring it back to the guy: “Oh, hey Gebby, it’s the rebasobineiter, part $145, labor $300 and change, your good to go”
He couldn’t tell me what’s actually wrong, he just starts swapping parts till by trial and error, he found the bad one. Flywheel, water pump, the wiring. Eventually something works, and you’ve paid for five parts you never needed.
A reflexive price cut on a listing is the exact same move. If the home was priced right to begin with, cutting the price isn’t a diagnosis, it’s a guess dressed up as a decision.
That’s the whole job though: reading the room. If we hit ten showings with no offer, or we go ten days with no showings at all, there’s always a reason.
Finding it means actually talking to the agents who walked through your home, not just logging that they showed up.
And here’s the part worth remembering: if your agent isn’t talking to you every week, they almost certainly aren’t talking to the other agents either.
The silence isn’t just about you not hearing from them, it usually means nobody’s hearing from them. Again, it’s not 2021, and an agent that lives in a vaccum is not helping you move your home.
And the room to be read, it isn’t just the buyer’s agent. It’s the inspector. It’s the attorney. It’s the HVAC guy who mentioned something offhand while he was in the crawlspace. Every one of those people is holding a piece of information that affects your outcome, and it’s my job to go get it, not wait for it to land in my inbox. You have real money on the line and I have a fiduciary responsibility to you, not to whoever’s easiest to reach.
That only works if I’m actually talking to everyone in the room, every week, whether there’s good news or not.
Ask your agent about their level of communication at the listing appointment, and then read the room.
Peace
