Ignoring gravity (and the market)

Almost every agent has faced this situation: your seller client prices their home at whatever number they believe it's worth - regardless of the market data.

It goes the same way with buyers: “We believe the home is only worth $750,000, so we will start our offer at $695,000,” they say. Meanwhile, there are three other offers over the list price of $799,000.

When I wrote the 13 Virtues, number 9 was “Perspective”, where the client would say that their trusted advisor “enables me to see things from different points of view.” And, “They are able to effectively create new perspectives for me so that I can make the best decisions possible.”

I also originally titled the list “The 13 Virtues of Being A Trusted Advisor”, and have since replaced “Trusted Advisor” with “Being A Professional Worth Hiring” to focus more on the “being” part.

In writing my upcoming book, Leads Are For Losers, I have gone back through the virtues many times, phrasing them as ways of ‘being’, and ‘perspective’ didn’t quite fit that template. Perspective is important, and it is something that is required; however, I combined it with “Being Open-Minded,” whereby one can create new perspectives - both for the advisor and the client.

On a call yesterday, a coaching client and I discussed a high-end listing where the seller was not very interested in the market’s price for his home. The seller wanted the agent to handle all this marketing and other activities to sell the home at the list price, which seemed pretty far above market value. 

The agent said to me on the call, “I think this is going to be a monumental waste of time and money.” He said that because his estimate of the value of where the home would sell is 25% less than where they are priced. So we practiced having a very frank conversation between the agent and the seller (#6 - Transparently Honest & #10 - Courageous). 

In the roleplay, I said, “What if the market doesn’t give you $9mm?”

Seller (played by the agent): “blah blah blah...” Followed by, “We have to try at this price.”

Me: “How long will you have to try before you know it isn’t going to happen?”

Seller: “It has to happen, because if I don’t sell close to this price then ...” (gave me a bunch of his specific worries and concerns)

We kind of went around and around for a moment, and then finally I said, “It sounds like The Market doesn’t impact you. It seems like you believe you can get whatever price you want outside of The Market Dynamics.”

Seller: “Yeah...”

Me: “The Market is like gravity. It is inescapable. Have you ever been able to ignore gravity?”

Seller: “No?”

Me: “If you jump off the roof of this new-dev home, you are going to practically kill yourself. You lose. If you ignore the Market in the selling of your home, you are also going to lose.”

Then I said, “Ignore the Market at your own peril,” which is a play on Chris Voss’s line, “Ignore human nature at your own peril.”

NOTE: I could have phrased the main punch line a little differently. I could have used some no-oriented questions, like “Would it be unreasonable to think that the Market is like gravity?” On the other hand, I am not sure that every conversation and sentence has to be worded to use Tactical Empathy.

The point I am making is that our job is not to tell people what to do. Our job is to open our clients’ frame of reference so that they can see that there are other options - and consequences - beyond what they have narrowed their focus to. Conversely, it is up to us to also be open-minded to hear from our clients what they are thinking and what they are seeing - it is always possible we have missed something.