You know what the weather is like right now in San Diego? It’s 85 degrees and sunny.  You know what it’s going to be like tomorrow?  85 degrees and sunny.  Next week?  85 degrees and sunny.

The funny thing is, they still do the weather report every day.  Turn on the news, and at some point the San Diego meteorologist is going to come on to tell you that it’s 85 degrees and sunny.  Every day, even thought it never changes.

You know why?  Because no news is still news.

That’s the approach you need to take when setting up contact systems for your active clients: no news is still news.  Even if you have nothing to report, you still have to give them a call with the update. Clients who don’t hear from their agents get nervous that they’ve been forgotten.  It’s important to keep them informed, even if you have nothing new to tell them.

This can become tough to do, particularly with a seller who has been on the market for a while. It’s not easy to pick up the phone each week to tell the seller, “Yup, we had another week without any showings or offers.” The challenge, of course, is to find some way to dress it up, to find SOMETHING new to talk about each week.  But that’s the job!

Think about it from your own perspective. Let’s say that you have a buyer who is in contract, waiting to hear back about her mortgage commitment.  A week goes by. No news. Another week goes by. No news.  You’re wondering what’s going on.  Would it be helpful if the loan officer gave you a call to update you that, in fact, he was still waiting to hear back from underwriting?  Of course it would.  Even if his update was only to tell you that he’d made no progress, that’s still an update.

All those people in San Diego, they want that weather report.  They don’t want to watch a newscast where the attitude is, “we’ll let you know when the weather changes, in the meantime, just hold tight.”  What kind of weather report is that?

Same idea.  Give your clients regular updates, even if you have nothing new to tell them.

This post is part of a series of what I call the “36-1/2 Rules for Client-Oriented Real Estate Agents,” a collection of short takes on the CORE concept that I’ve developed over the years of discussing and teaching the system.  We’ll count up to the 36th rule over the next few months, and then the 1/2 rule.  You can get the full list of rules by clicking on the “36-1/2 Rules for CORE Agents” category on the blog – scroll from the bottom if you want to read them in order.