July 22nd, 2026
The Customer Nobody Fights For
I don't write about real estate much. Nobody much wants to hear about it unless they're buying or selling a home, which is a small slice of us at any given time. So I mostly leave it alone in my weekly articles.
But sometimes something gnaws at me until I have to say it out loud, and this is one of those times. Here it is.
First, a confession. I can't change a tire, hang a door, or fix much of anything with my hands. What I can do, what I've done obsessively for fifty years, is figure out how to sell a home for more. Helping sellers walk away with a bigger check is the one puzzle I've devoted my professional life to.
And here's what perplexes me. Real estate may be the only industry on earth that doesn't put that seller, our customer, the one who writes the check, first. Not second. Not third. Even further back than that. And after all these years, I still can't fully explain why.
Whose Money Keeps the Lights On?
Let me explain the check part first.
When a home sells, the seller pays the commission. All of it. And that money quietly fans out and funds the entire industry. The brokerages, the agents, the coaches, the conferences, the associations, and yes, the home search portals you scroll at night. Trace any dollar in this business back far enough and you land at the same table, with the same person signing the same check. The seller.
So you'd think the whole industry would organize itself around one question. How do we get that seller what they want most, the highest possible price? You'd think wrong.
Walk into a big firm, or a small one, and ask what's on the minds of the people running it. It isn't sellers. It's agents. How do we recruit more of them, how do we keep the ones we have, how do we stop them from strolling down the street to the competition.
Most real estate firms are reluctant to stand up and say what they know to be true, “here's a better way to sell a home, proven to put more money in sellers' pockets,” because a few of their agents, usually the established ones, the names you know, don't need it and don't want to change their ways. Rock the boat and they might grumble and leave.
The better way goes unspoken. The majority of agents suffer. And the seller never hears about it.
Your Own Home, Turned Against You
Then there are the portals. We hand them our sellers' homes, and they hand the world days on market, the full price-cut history, and on some of them a helpful little offer guide nudging buyers to come in under asking. Picture hiring someone to sell your car, then watching them tape a sign to the windshield listing every day it hasn't sold and every time you dropped the price.
Worse, the portals use your home as bait. Your photos, your description, your biggest asset attracts a buyer, and that buyer gets sold off to an agent who paid for the lead and usually knows less about your home than the buyer who clicked on it. So the buyer isn't served, and you're harmed, because that agent has no idea what makes your home special and, honestly, doesn't much care which home the buyer lands in.
Sellers fund everything we do, so serving them better should be everything we do.
What Ferrari Knows That Your Agent Doesn't
Now the part that keeps me up at night, because I know it cold. There are absolutely, positively ways to market a home, to show it, to position it against the competition, and to negotiate the offer, that borrow straight from the playbook of Rolex and Ferrari and the great premium brands. Done right, they sell homes faster and for more money, a lot more money, every single time. That isn't a theory. It's a fact I've watched prove itself for fifty years. I didn't read it in a book. I built it, tested it, and watched it work.
And here's the quiet tragedy. Most homes are still sold the way they were half a century ago.
Put it on the market. List it on the MLS and the same portals as everyone else, with marketing that looks like everyone else's. Show it. Wait. Cut the price if it stalls.
That approach runs on hope and time, and it is almost entirely missing the sophisticated marketing, positioning, showing, and negotiation strategies that separate a good sale from a great one. It costs sellers a small fortune in lower prices, and the cruelest part is they never know it. They assume that's simply what their home was worth. It wasn't. It was worth what a smarter process would have gotten them.
Four Questions Your Agent Hopes You Won't Ask
This isn't a knock on real estate agents. Most of you have an agent or two you count as friends, and you can't blame them for what they were never taught. Nearly all the training out there is about how to win your listing, not how to sell your home for a lot more money, which, when you think about it, is the finest listing tool ever invented.
So do me a favor. The next time you talk to an agent, ask a few honest questions and listen closely. I could give you a hundred, but here's just four. What exactly, step by step, do you do during each showing to make my home shine above every competing home a buyer is seeing? What's your strategy so time on the market doesn't make buyers assume my home was passed over?
How do you create real urgency, without pressure, so buyers make a fast, strong offer?
And once an offer comes in, before you bring it to me, what do you do to learn how much higher that buyer will actually go?
Ask. Then listen. It's not their fault if the answers come up thin. I've spent a lifetime learning these things, and I still find it hard to believe that almost no one teaches them. They teach how to get a seller to sign. Selling the home for more is a different craft entirely.
The Bravest Thing a Brokerage Could Do
And that's the shame of it. The firms, big and small, could build that craft into a real program, brand it, teach it, and stand behind it. Most agents would do more business because of it, and serve their sellers better too. But most firms' number one priority is recruiting and keeping agents. Which may make us the only business in America that markets harder to the people who work in it than to the people who pay for it.
Why I'm Telling You Any of This
I'm not selling you a thing here. You've got my email ([email protected]), and you're my neighbors. If a phone call with me can help, I'm glad to make the time. I don't list homes anymore, but I'll happily get on the phone and help you make sure your agent, the one you choose, is doing all the right things. Phone calls only, so be kind to my calendar.
And if you'd like a brief glimpse of what I teach, you can learn it in 11 minutes at 72hour.com. If you're selling, or even thinking about it, those 11 minutes may be the most valuable minutes you ever spend, because they'll show you how to sell faster and for tens of thousands more. Consider it my gift.
I've been fortunate. I've made more than enough, so none of this is about money for me anymore. It's about an industry that has been awfully good to me, and my stubborn hope that it will finally see the one priority it keeps stepping over. The person who writes the check ought to come first. Everything good follows from that.
Few could know how deeply I care about this industry. It provided me and my family with the opportunity to live a wonderful life.
The truth is most real estate agents work their hearts out, with good intentions, for people they genuinely want to help. They don't know what they don't know, and their hands are tied by tradition and by the misplaced priorities of the very organizations that exist to serve them, but don't.
I'm not trying to tear this business down. I'm trying to get it to look up. Because the day it puts the customer first is the day everybody in it, agents included, finally wins.
Okay, I got that off my chest. Thanks for indulging me. Next week, back to the mystery of life, love, and liberty.
