WELCOME

Y’all, before we get into real estate this week, I need to talk about something extremely important: Taylor Swift and these Life of a Showgirl encore songs. Oh, my stars, I am beside myself! I love that woman, and there’s something magical about waiting to see what she’s going to pull out next… even though that Patient Zero video almost ended me.

Funny enough, all that listening to the new songs got me thinking about what I’ve been talking about with my team lately. I feel like we spend an awful lot of time in real estate learning what to say, whether it’s learning scripts or practicing presentations. We hire coaches to help us master objections and negotiations. We’ve figured out exactly how to counter when somebody tells us their cousin’s neighbor got a real estate license and will list the house for one percent. (And if we’re pros, we can do it without rolling our eyes.)

However, I’m not sure we spend nearly enough time learning when to hush. Because the longer I do this—and y’all know I’ve been in these streets for a minute—the more convinced I am that some of the most important information a client will ever give you comes when you stop trying to impress them and simply listen. Then, once you’ve really heard what they’re telling you, that creates another responsibility altogether: you’ve got to be willing to tell them the truth about what you heard. So let’s get into it!

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

I was thinking this week about listing appointments. I really think we ought to stop calling them listing appointments and start calling them “listening appointments,” because if we walk into somebody’s house and the first words out of our mouths are, “Show me around,” we have already missed an opportunity.

For me, I don’t want to see the kitchen first and I’m not at the point where I care one whit about the primary bathroom. I’m not yet concerned about the countertops, the roof, the HVAC, or whether there’s glorious hardwood hiding underneath all that Berber. What I want is to sit down with the seller and ask them why they’re moving. I need to know where they’re going. I’m looking to understand what happens if I bring them an offer tomorrow. And what if it takes a year? Does that matter? What does this move mean to them? This is because good agents watch the market, but the best agents watch the people.

I had clients recently who I thought were selling because they’d downsized too much. They’d sold their house in Buckhead and moved into a one-bedroom condo. I thought they simply needed more breathing room. (I don’t care how long y’all have been married; suddenly downgrading to a shared sink can open marriage cracks that have been sealed for decades, y’all. Decades.) I figured they were empty nesters who’d gotten a little bit too ambitious about downsizing the original nest. What I didn’t understand at first was that she had breast cancer and he had throat cancer. They needed to be closer to their children.

Oh, my stars. That was not a garden variety-squabble over bathroom real estate. Theirs was an entirely different conversation, and if I didn’t understand that, how in the world could I properly represent them?

We Have to Find the Real Problem

Sometimes people don’t tell you everything and it’s not because they’re being dishonest with us. Sometimes it’s a simple case of them not knowing yet. People can be private and they can be scared. There are plenty of people who don’t even entirely understand their own motivation, so how can we expect them to share it yet? (Spoiler alert: sometimes it’s because they’re being dishonest with us.) Knowing this, our job is to create enough trust that we can get as close to the truth as possible.

Every day I tell my clients, “We’re on the same team. There’s nothing you’re going to tell me that I’m going to run out and tell somebody else. If you can’t trust me today, don’t hire me.” I mean that deep in my bones. However, there’s the other half of that bargain: if I expect them to tell me the truth, I have to tell them the truth, too.

Let me be real here—I’ve made this mistake myself more times than I care to admit. I used to sit down with a seller and say, “What do you think your house is worth?” Well, honey, everybody has looked at Zillow. Everybody has looked at Realtor.com. They’ve Googled their address sixteen ways from Sunday. Instead of putting somebody on the defensive, I’ve learned that it’s far more effective to just put the information on the table. I’ll say, “Here’s what Zillow says. Here’s Realtor.com. Here’s Homes.com. Here’s Redfin. What do you think about these numbers?” So instead of playing poker (where there’s an inherent winner and loser), we’re having an effective conversation.

Let me tell y’all, I never want to be the agent who says what the client wants to hear today… and then takes six damn weeks mustering up the bravery to give them the real facts six weeks from now, after their house has been sitting there collecting days on market.

Sometimes the Truth Is, “You Get to Keep It”

I had sellers recently who were extremely motivated, although I didn’t completely understand why. The house was beautiful and in a fabulous school district. I didn’t see the impetus to go, but I knew they wanted that house sold. Finally, I told them, “Y’all have a choice. You can keep your house listed at this price, and lucky you, you get to stay there. It’s a gorgeous house. I hope you enjoy the rest of your life in it. But if you actually want to sell it, you need to reduce the price.”

They told me, “Glennda, absolutely not.”

Three hours later, the husband called me and reduced the price.

In a nutshell, that’s the job. People think the best agent is whoever gives them the highest number at the listing appointment, but that’s all wrong. The best agent is the one willing to tell the client something they may not want to hear while there’s still time to act on that info. That applies to buyers just as much as sellers.

Yes, I Will Talk Myself Out of the Commission

Last week, I had a buyer ready to buy a house. So what did I do? Well, I told him not to do it.

Oh my stars, that man thought I’d lost my damn mind.

The thing was, he liked the house, as did his family. Plus, he was prepared to put $300,000 into it to bring it up to speed. I told him I didn’t care if he put $3 million into it; that house was never going to become the house they wanted because every surface needed changing. I knew the more they dug in, the unhappier they would be because they’d have to replace every fixture and texture. Plus, the pool was in the wrong place and couldn’t be moved. I could see where this was going and I knew they’d ultimately end up hating it.

He looked at me and basically said, “You understand you’re talking yourself out of a $45,000 commission?”

I asked him to give me five days and I started calling. Eighty-eight phone calls in one day, looking for something better in the area where he wanted to live. Then Friday morning at 9:35, a house hit the market. I was inside it by 10:05. My buyer was on an airplane, and I told him, “When you land, meet me at this address at 3:15.” By 7:15 that night, I had written an all-cash, full-price offer on a $2.1 million house.

Was it more expensive? Absolutely. But I told him he could have put another $500,000 into the first house and it still would not have been this house. Guess what? He and his daughter loved the place as-is, hard stop. Afterward, he told me something I wrote down because it meant so much to me. He said he trusted me because he believed I would avoid my own success if that success came at somebody else’s expense. I swear to y’all, I want to have this embroidered on a pillow because that right there is the whole ballgame.

We Can’t Need the Deal More Than They Do

This is kind of the elephant in the room in real estate: if we’re in the position where we desperately need every commission, it becomes so much more difficult to tell somebody not to buy the house. When the notion of our own mortgage payments are on the line, it becomes harder to walk away from a seller who treats us terribly. It becomes harder to just be honest and sat, “No, I’m not taking this listing at a price I know is ridiculous.” People can sense the blood in the water when you need the deal worse than they do.

That’s why I advocate that we build our business in a way that gives us the freedom to tell the truth. It’s the harder route to navigate, but it’s the far better path, so save your money. (Don’t blow your whole commission on a Mercedes. Trust me.) Build your pipeline. Keep prospecting. Make the eighty-eight phone calls. Do whatever you have to do so that when you’re sitting across from somebody at their kitchen table, your advice is about what is best for them.

I talk to my clients the way I talk to my family. Sometimes your family tells you things you don’t want to hear, not because they need to be right and not because they want power over you, but because they love you enough to risk making you mad. That’s exactly how I think about real estate.

Listening is where it starts because I can’t help my clients until I understand my clients. But listening alone isn’t enough. Once I hear them—really hear them—I owe them the truth. And sometimes the most valuable thing we can do as real estate agents is to tell our clients the last thing they want to hear.

P.S. If you can’t be a good example, be a cautionary tale. Don’t buy the Mercedes.

glenndabaker

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Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

The Sandwich Generation

If you’re part of the sandwich generation—raising your babies on one end and worrying about your parents on the other—2480 Flint Creek Drive in Cumming, GA, may be the house that finally lets everybody exhale. You have 7,645 square feet, five bedrooms and six bathrooms on nearly an acre in Creekstone Estates. So there’s room for everybody you love without everybody you love being right on top of you. (Trust me, that distinction matters. A lot.) The fully finished basement even has its own secondary kitchen, so Mom and Dad can have real independence while still being close enough that you’re not driving across town every time somebody needs something.

Meanwhile, the kids get Forsyth County schools and all the Creekstone amenities, you get a gorgeous chef’s kitchen, a beautiful primary suite and enough space to remember that you are, in fact, an adult with a life of your own. Outside there’s a resort-style pool, outdoor kitchen and covered porches where three generations can actually enjoy being together. Multi-generational living shouldn’t feel like you’re cramming multiple families into one house. Done right, it feels like this: everybody together when they want to be, everybody with a place to go when they don’t.