Why Real Estate Agents Fail To Sell – My Experience

Rob  00:08

All right, do I have a story for you, I was on vacation, had something come up, I had a horrible experience with a salesperson. And I wanted to share it with you. It’s a realtor. if you’re a real estate agent out there, I want you to listen to this episode with open ears, meaning I want you to think of this as a separate entity from you.

Rob  00:28

So while you’re listening, I don’t want you to think about why would never do this, I would never do that. I want you to think about Hmm, I’ve been there. How do I function? And how do I behave? In my sales calls, in my sales meetings, and sales meetings are all the meetings that you have, when you meet with potential buyers, those meetings become critical, and you need to think clearly.

Rob  00:50

And all I want you to do is take off your personal feelings about how you think you do listen to the story, and then think about does this impact me in any way, shape or form? How could I improve? Let’s get started.

V/O  01:02

You’re listening to The Slow Pitch Podcast, a podcast about selling less and closing more.

Rob  01:09

Alright, so this is pretty much going to rely on a story that here’s the situation. My wife and I went on vacation not too long ago, we decided we wanted to go to Costa Rica, and just check the place out. We’ve heard so many good things about it. We heard so many things where people were saying, it’s a beautiful place, and the people are great, and the beaches and all this other stuff. And we said let’s just go.

Rob  01:30

So we booked a flight. You know, you do a little research online, and you find out some good information. But here’s the thing. We got out there, we start tooling around and we realized, man, this is a nice place. What in the world are we doing here, maybe we should look at this place as a potential place to buy another house. And it could be a second house, it could be a vacation, or it could be a we weren’t sure what to do. Like we thought this would be great to live here. It would be beautiful beaches are nice.

Rob  01:54

The people are really nice. I highly recommend if you haven’t been to visit, but that’s not what this episode is about. Here’s what the episode is about. Today, we go on vacation, we decided on a whim. Let’s see what it’s like to live here. What if we went and saw some houses, you know, every you know, spend a day out of the out of the week we’re there. Let’s spend a day just looking at some houses.

Rob  02:12

We reached out to a real estate agent and said, hey, we’d like to see some houses is that possible? In the first city, we go to that real estate agent did a really good job of asking some very pointed questions. So here’s how I’m gonna contrast these two situations, we end up in two different cities over the course of the week in city number one, we went to Tamarindo. And then Tamarindo, we decided let’s just take a look around and we started to decide let’s let’s go see some houses.

Rob  02:38

And so when we met with that first real estate agent, she goes, Why are Why are you looking? And what are you looking for? And why do you want to see the homes here? What specifically are you looking for in terms of style? You’re looking for something modern? You’re looking at something beach related mountain really like what are you looking for you want something secluded? You want something in the in the city itself? Like what what are you looking for, you know, how close do you want to be to different things? What are some of your must haves? All the basic questions?

Rob  03:04

If you’re a real estate agent, you should be asking, right? Here’s the most important question she asked, hey, what are you looking to move? While we were on vacation? We didn’t think we were going to be moving anytime soon. We weren’t sure what we were doing. We’re like, do we move here? Do we buy this as a second home? We didn’t know what we wanted. Right? So, this realtor started asking us some more pointed questions.

Rob  03:23

And we quickly realized that this real estate agent was vetting us out to make sure that we were somebody that was literally serious in buying someplace, but also not wasting her time, not wasting other agents time, and so on and so forth. And so, she started narrowing some things down and starting to figure out, you know, these two may be serious. And so, it was worth her time. And we were we were serious enough to go, if we can find some place at the right place at the right price, we would certainly take a look at it and make sure that we start going down that process if it makes sense.

Rob  03:57

Fast forward, go to the second city, the second city we went to was Jaco. Both are on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. And they’re a little different, each one is a little different. So, we got to Jaco and said, Let’s take a look at some houses to hear like, well, who knows, maybe this is even better. This is more modern. We’re, we’re more in the thick of things here. Let’s do that. Let’s take a look here.

Rob  04:16

So we reached out to a real estate agent there. This, my friends, is where it went sideways. Here’s what we ended up finding. We reached out to a real estate agent. And she asked us a couple of quick questions. When do you want to look? Well, now? That’s what we want, right? Oh, it’s urgent.

Rob  04:30

We need to not well, it’s not really urgent. But when you want to look okay, what do you want to see? Well, we told her we wanted to see this many bedrooms, as many bathrooms, give her some basic retirement requirements and say, here’s the price range. This is what we’re looking for. And she’s like, Okay, let me set up some options here. And then she emails us a list of links that are listings that we have options to go see.

Rob  04:52

And she basically says which ones do you like out of these, and which ones do you not want to see? I think she sent us maybe 14 listings maybe 12 I don’t know I’m like Why are you sending us these listings? If you don’t know what we want? Why don’t you ask us more questions? Now this was all via email. She wouldn’t call us. She didn’t talk to us. She didn’t do any of those types of things. She just emailed us these questions. A couple of quick questions.

Rob  05:12

Here’s what the listings that we have. Okay, so we looked at the listings, we looked at a few of them and said, oh, I don’t think this is one that’s going to fit. We don’t want that one. This one’s out of our price range. We don’t want this one. Well, one of the ones that we said we don’t want to look at, because we could tell by the listing, it was not at all what we were looking for.

Rob  05:29

We sent it back and said, we don’t want this one to guess what she says. She says, no, you got to see this one. This is this is an incredible one. You must see this. Okay. Now, meanwhile, one of our questions was not Hey, are you looking for rentals? Or are you looking to buy long term, she didn’t ask any of those things, right. So, lo and behold, the first house that she brings us to is a three unit, let’s call it apartments.

Rob  05:53

So, there was three units, three apartments in one house. Physically, it looked like a house three different entrances, three different, call it, living room slash kitchen, slash bedrooms, slash bathroom, but three different spaces. And they were all connected if you wanted to be connected, but you could also close the door and be separated.

Rob  06:13

That was not at all what we were looking for. And so in the first place, we said, okay, it’s nice, but it’s not what we’re looking for. Meanwhile, the person that owned the house had to had to be there, because this is the person she was also a real estate agent. So meanwhile, this other real estate agents, they’re thinking we’re seriously interested in this house, we had zero interest in this house. And when we walked through, it was like, oh, this is nice.

Rob  06:33

But get into these long conversations with this other realtor outside of the realtor we were talking to and we basically said, Yeah, this is nice was not really what we’re looking for. Okay, fine, thanks. We go to the next place. This was literally a step down from anything we were we talked about, or what we thought we had suggested we wanted, it was a two bedroom instead of a three, let’s call it.

Rob  06:51

And it was one of those that just the conditions were not as nice as what I would have expected for the price range. And so we said no, this is not what we’re doing, after four or five places, like they were all not far from each other. But we started getting into these places. And it was like, these are not fitting what we’re looking for. And so at one point, I said to her, I go, can I ask you a question?

Rob  07:12

What are the rest of these houses look like? Based on the listings? I see. And based on the ones we’ve been to, they’re not quite matching. And number two, I feel like we’re not in the right ballpark, because we want something a little bit more modern. And for her modern, she didn’t seem to understand what that was. And she didn’t ask us what we thought matter was, she thought modern was houses that were built in the 90s.

Rob  07:33

Because Costa Rica is a little behind us. And that’s okay. If she would have asked us what what is my What do you mean by modern? What does that mean to you? That would have changed the way that we would have had the conversation about which houses we were looking for.

Rob  07:46

And we would have said, based on what we’re describing, she would have said this is the house you want to look at after 10 houses 10, literally 10 houses, we found a house that was really, really nice, but it was it was one of those, you know, did you buy this, do you not? But we’re not really that that 100% serious? Yeah. Are we interested? Sure. Were anybody’s interested in getting a new house?

Rob  08:07

But, do we have the money to back that? Do we have the actions that we’re going to take or we’re going to do those things? I don’t know, I don’t I don’t feel like we’re gonna because it’s just the things don’t all line up. And here’s what ended up happening. I have to think about, I think back, and I think you know, yeah, we okay, mind you, we started this conversation, we’re partly to blame, right?

Rob  08:28

We’re wasting a realtor’s time. So, my bad, I shouldn’t be doing that. But when we did that, you if you’re a good realtor, your job is to vet out serious interested buyers and non-interested buyers or serious, but they don’t have any interest at all. Like they may seriously want to look at a house. But are they going to buy it? Probably not. Could she have asked questions like, you know, what kind of funding?

Rob  08:51

Are you looking to put forward into this? Are you looking to like just a minimum investment? Are you looking at it as I want to do something more significant? Well, it’s going to be a 100% cash. Like she didn’t ask any of that kind of questions either. Like, those are serious questions to determine whether somebody is a buyer or not, right. So, we wasted her time.

Rob  09:08

But then she wasted hours by going to houses that had no right to be shown to us and probably to several other people. But more importantly, she wasted the realtors of the other home. So the home owners have a realtor of their own. Sometimes they weren’t for her own company. And so that realtor that they had to show up and show the house. Well guess what? Their time got wasted.

Rob  09:30

Second, some of the homes where people were living there and they were had to vacate their home for over an hour or whatever and leave house so that they could show the house. Those people got their time wasted. So you think about all the other impacts that happened about wasting everybody else’s time

Rob  09:49

This realtor did not do themselves a good service. In fact, when we were when in fact one of the conversations we were having, at one of the houses she was getting into some extremely I guess personal conversations because she knew several people around town, she would show up and somebody was living there was like, oh, I know this person started talking to them.

Rob  10:09

Instead of showing the house to us, and or letting us look around, she was engaging us in conversations of things that they do around town. And then the realtor of the other house was out of the house, though, the homeowner was like, Can I show you this?

Rob  10:20

Can I show you that and they were trying to be serious about their sale, they couldn’t get anywhere, because she was just taking everything off the tracks, like she was not committed to showing a house the way you’re supposed to show it. I’m not telling you this as a complaint. I’m telling you this, because I don’t want you to be a horrible salesperson.

Rob  10:40

And I don’t listen, she’s doing the best she can, right. And she’s probably getting a lot of requests for people to see things in and around town. But here’s the thing, as a salesperson, your job is to determine are you looking for a rental when we went to that first place?

Rob  10:56

That’s a rental house, that’s a place where you can rent it out to three different people make some income out of it. That’s not what we were looking for. We didn’t know that when we walked in. But once we walked in and walked out, we were like, that’s not what we want. Should we have been able to tell her that? Yes.

Rob  11:09

But if she would have asked some questions, we could have determined that early on, instead of wasting that other realtors and homeowners time as a good salesperson, you should know whether or not somebody’s going to waste your time or not by have some very pointed questions, the 15 to 30, maybe 45 minute conversation that that first realtor had in their office before we even left the office to go look at homes was time well spent.

Rob  11:33

She was in the office already. She had the time to ask us some questions. And from that she gleaned that this might be a person who would be interested in buying, because we might be and there were some options there that we could pursue, right. But she also was looking for. And in fact, one point she even made the comment was like, you know, what’s your objective here? What are you trying to get accomplished?

Rob  11:56

Like you just looking to see what people’s houses look like? Is that what you’re looking for? Or are you looking to actually buy a house? Like she asked point out, she’s trying to decide, is this an option of a conversation that she should decline and say thank you very much.

Rob  12:09

But I have nothing that I can really show you that fit or be nicely, you know, nicely exit out, right? That’s the goal of this episode, I want you to think about anytime you’re in a sales call, your job is to invest five to 30 minutes in a conversation. And sometimes those conversations can be very difficult, because they’re just I had a conversation with somebody other day, that was kind of circular conversation.

Rob  12:33

They talked over me, they were just having conversations about things that they thought they knew about, what I do. And then they explain how they did this and how they did that had nothing to do with what we were doing for services. And then all of a sudden, it was like, well, can you do this?

Rob  12:46

And it’s like, no, no, we’re not going to do that. Like that’s not going to work for somebody like that. I want you as a salesperson to think about how you make sure you don’t waste your time, but more importantly, the time of other people who you now need to work with. I think about that second realtor.

Rob  13:03

I feel bad because the other realtors that she deals with, you could tell they were not happy. They didn’t understand what we were looking for, because she didn’t understand. And they went got their time wasted. And I’ll bet next time she calls to say, hey, I want to show this house that other realtor may just simply say I think I have a buyer already we’re in negotiations, we’re all set, thank you very much, because it’s not worth their time.

Rob  13:26

If they see this a few times with this lady, this is never going to happen again, for that other realtor, they’re going to say politely decline. So, I hope this helps. Think about your time is valuable money even if your time is invested into somebody. Sometimes it is time to just cut loose because it’s not going to make any sense. Make that decision as early as possible. And until next time, slow down and close more.

V/O  13:53

Thank you for listening to The Slow Pitch. Do you have a question about sales? Call or text your question at (608) 708-SLOW. That’s (608) 708-7569. Or you can email them to Questions@TheSlowPitch.com.  Slow Down and Close More.

Rob  14:43

Thanks as always, for listening today. If you’d like this podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review. We really appreciate it. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at The Slow Pitch. We were mixed today as always by Johnny Polakis. We were produced by High Gravity Studios. Music credits and other notes are in the show notes at TheSlowPitch.com And we’ll be back with another episode soon