It probably depends on your point of view. Are you looking for a quick nickel or a slow dollar? Do you want a job or a business? How about in “this market”? Isn’t it better to have a buyer than a listing now?
I’ve written before that my expertise is in getting and getting rid of listings. In some of those posts I’ve seen comments to the effect that I forgot to mention working buyers. I didn’t forget. To sell a house you need a buyer. Each time and without exception. It just goes with the territory. But if your goal is to have a long-term stable business then you are going to want to learn to list. Period. If you disagree – even a little bit with anything you’ve read so far, please do yourself a favor and set aside those disagreements and read on.
The biggest single barrier to increased production is FIXED IDEAS. We all have them in one area or another. You have certain ideas about “how much business is possible”. Those “logical thoughts” are the very thing holding you back.
Is is easier to get a buyer and sell them a house than it is to take a salable listing? The correct answer is yes. If this were not a true statement new agents wouldn’t have a prayer of ever getting any business. Reason? Buyers are seldom ever looking for an agent. They are looking for a house; they are willing to tolerate talking to an agent in order to see the house. Most buyers are almost never “shopping for an agent”. If you wanted to buy a car can you imagine saying to your partner, “I sure hope we meet a charming and fun car salesman today. Someone who is a lot of laughs we can really bond with.”
Sellers are different. Most of them are looking for an agent to hire. Totally different mindset.
Why does it take more skill to list than to work buyers? Simple: because you don’t have to ask the buyer to pay you. It is a “free” service you are offering to them. The seller is going to give the listing agent a high enough commission that there is a paycheck for both agents. It is the listing agent who goes in and gets that agreement signed. Please understand that I am not saying it is “harder work” – because it isn’t. In fact, it is a lot easier work, with no heavy lifting of any kind. But that isn’t the good part. Lets pretend that your goal was to do as good and as efficient a job as possible and to make as much money in the same amount of time. Just pretend that with me. How many buyers can you work at once? Without help and if you are amazing? How many at the very same time? Two? Three? Could you juggle 4 or 5 at the same time? And keep doing all of the necessary actions to have 4 or 5 more for next week because you will sell all of the ones you are working with right now? Could you keep doing that week after week? Month after month? Year after year?
I don’t think so. I’ve seen one agent here in Phoenix do around a hundred buyer sides a year for 2 – 3 years (without meaningful help) before hitting the wall. Finally a heart doctor told him he was going to have to slow down. The best buyer agent I’ve ever seen or heard about (he had a remarkable system for working buyers) did (with help) about 500 buyer deals the year before last. This year he isn’t even in his companies top 10 agents. (Hint: none of his companies top 10 agents are doing 500 deals this year). Am I saying one can’t make money working buyers? Nope. What I am saying is that I personally know (or at least know of and what they are doing) most of the top agents in North America. The pattern for almost all of them who enjoy long-term stable success is they have a listing based business. Even though most of them do about as many buyer sides as they do seller sides, their businesses are listings based.
Do you have to have a listings based business? No, you don’t. One of the wonderful things about this business is you can set it up any way you want to set it up. Further, you can change it anytime you feel like it. My first 12 years in the business I primarily worked buyers. I “took listings” but wasn’t very successful at actually selling most of them. The only meaningful thing that separated me from the pack was I continued to know that I was an incompetent dolt on the subject of taking listings. I didn’t figure out explanations of how it was “better” to keep doing it my way. I knew there was something to know that I didn’t know yet. Was it hard for me to figure out? Well, yes and no. The biggest obstacles were the stupid (anything I believed that was unworkable) ideas I had about how it should be done. If an idea is really “right” that “rightness” is easily tested: it works. Again and again and again, without variation. My own fixed ideas were what got in my way. If you think you already know all about something there would be no good reason to then work on finding out about it. You already know. Once you know you don’t know you then can actually know – or at least start to know. So one has to first come up to not knowing.
Nothing about the subject or learning it is complex or difficult. Like most subjects, this one too, just reeks with false data and moron ideas. Our industry is chock full of people who don’t do it or never did it who (for only X dollars) will tell you how to do it. But it can be done and (if you want) can be done by you. I’ve written all about it here.
