Don’t beat yourself up by looking at old lists. Coach Darryl Davis shares strategies to help you go back to the drawing board and consider the factors you still have control over.
Your listing isn’t working, the seller is getting anxious, and you’re starting to feel it, too. Before you take that pressure as a personal failure, please reframe the situation and then tell me how to specifically discuss it with the seller.
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Think of your listing like a shop window on a busy street. Your job is to get as many shoppers as possible to stop and look. Position your displays, provide good lighting, and place them in high-traffic areas.
What you can’t control is the price tag in the corner. Because it belongs to the owner. Mixing up these two tasks can turn a normal slow stretch into a crisis of confidence.
Actual job content
As a listing agent, your job is not to sell homes. Your job is to give you maximum exposure so that the most qualified buyers possible get through the door, because exposure drives buyers, buyers drive demand, and demand drives price. You are in the market. You advertise. The buyer decides and the seller manages the number. Once that becomes clear, the anxiety will go elsewhere.
Step 1: Build a marketing audit
Print a calendar, document everything you do, and keep documenting it every day. Most professionals severely underestimate their efforts.
Don’t just count open houses, but campaigns as well. Open houses, broker tours, ads, social posts, mass emails, postcards, agent-to-agent calls, and more. Each will be placed on the calendar. Give yourself daily exposure: Every day, your home is listed on the MLS, populates the portal, and appears in front of buyers on 5 or 10 sites. Please mark every day. This is real, continuous marketing, but sellers rarely realize it’s happening. Understand your competition: Look at comparable active and sold listings. Find out how long they were left alone, what adjustments were made, and what ultimately made them tick. This is evidence of price negotiation.
Step 2: Have a conversation
Next, sit down with your seller and work through the calendar together. The script should look like this:
“I want to show you everything we’ve done to market your home. This is open houses, daily online exposure, phone calls, mailings. This is my job and what I’ve done. Even though marketing is this strong, buyers’ If we don’t see the traffic or the offers we want yet, the one lever that we haven’t adjusted yet is the price. I can’t control that. So let me show you what the market is telling us.
Notice what it does. It proves you’ve done your part, removes responsibility from both of you, and hands the seller a clear decision backed by data instead of vague worries.
Do thorough marketing before raising prices
When marketing is truly at its full potential, conversations about pricing are relevant. Make sure that’s the case before you get there. Raise your listing in such a way that buyers will look at it and audit it dispassionately.
Lead with photos: Buyers shop with their eyes. It determines whether you click the first photo or not. If the image is dimly lit, cluttered, or taken on a dark day, retake it. Professional photography is the least expensive and most effective modification. Rewrite the heading and description. The first line of copy is a hook, not a list of bedroom numbers. Market the lifestyle the home offers and then explain the details. Update the campaign rhythm. A new open house, a fresh social push, an email to the agent who showed it, and an improved piece if the seller made adjustments. Even for older lists, movement creates new exposure. Re-investigate the buyer agent you visited. Call them and hear directly what buyers have said. That feedback is gold, and often, but not always, real objections surface.
If you’ve done all that and still have the house, you’ve won the price negotiation and can come from a position of strength rather than an apology. And if the seller doesn’t adjust after hearing everything, that’s their right and your job becomes documentation and patience.
Continue marketing, record all conversations, and calmly present market data at regular intervals. No one wants to sell more than the seller. All you can do is make sure that when they are ready to make a decision, they have everything they need to make a good decision.
Be effective, not emotional
You care about your client, which is why this is so upsetting. Professionals who blame themselves can’t think clearly enough to help themselves, so stay compassionate and stop punishing yourself.
Be more like a reliable doctor. Compassionate, but calm enough to read the medical record and recommend next steps.
Perhaps the answer lies in the market. Maybe it’s the price. Both live outside your control. Your job is exposure, and if you give it your all, you’ve done your job.
Daryl Davis, CSP, is a nationally recognized real estate speaker, bestselling author, and coach with over 40 years of experience in the industry. For more information, visit darrylspeaks.com.
