All this week, I will be publishing my five key takeaways from the new book Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate by Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff and Chief Economist Stan Humphries.  You can read my review of the book at Inman News here, and the rest of the “five takeaways” here. 

When I teach a group of new agents, they invariably ask me how they’re supposed to answer the question, “how many homes have you sold?”  It’s an intimidating situation for them, because they’re often going for a listing against more experienced agents and facing challenges earning the trust of clients who quite naturally are skeptical of someone who hasn’t been in the business for that long.

Well, we’ve always had a couple of stock responses to that question, like this chestnut: “How long have I been in the business? Well, it feels like FOREVER!”  I think that’s cute, but it’s also a little misleading, and I hate coaching people to mislead their clients.  So I’ve always stressed what I think are a few better ways to do it:

• Highlight your work experience: “Well, I might be new to real estate, but I’m not new to taking care of clients. In my past career, you can see from my testimonials the attention I take to….”   If you have an interesting or impressive prior career (or even educational background), you can stress that.

• Make your newness a virtue: “Well, I haven’t been in the business that long, but I’ve learned the right way with all the new tools that agents have to market your home. You can go with an agent who’s been in the business for years, but are you sure you’re getting someone who is on top of all the latest technologies and cutting-edge trends?” This way, you confront it head on, but make your inexperience a positive.

• Stress the personal attention: “Well, you can list with an agent with 25 or 30 other listings, but then you’re not working with her, are you? You’re getting her assistant. When you list with me, you’re my top priority.”  Here, you take advantage of the very fact that you don’t have a lot of listings to point out how important that client will be to you, and how she won’t get lost in the shuffle.

Those are all good ways to confront that challenge, but now in Pillow Talk, you have another talking point.  Rascoff and Humphries crunched the data to looks for correlations between agent demographics and how successful they were in selling homes quickly and for a higher price.

And you know what they found?  First, they discovered that agents with relatively little experience actually took less time to sell a home:

Compared to the newbies with less than five years’ experience, agents who have been at it for ten to thirty years usually take a week longer to sell a home.  Agents with thirty or forty years’ experience take two extra weeks as compared to the group of new agents.

(Page 152).  That’s pretty good, but what about the price? Well, they also found “no statistical difference” in the final sale price between relative newbies and more experienced agents.  Rascoff and Humphries conclude:

When you’re looking for someone to help sell your home, it makes instinctive sense to turn to the most experienced person you can find.  They’ve been in this game a long time, and it might give you peace of mind to know that you’re in experienced hands…But if the thing you’re looking for is a higher sale price, the data says it doesn’t matter how long your agent has been on the job.

(Page 153).

So now, when new agents are asked about their inexperience, they can point to one of the leading texts on the real estate industry and explain how new agents sell homes for the same price but significantly faster than experienced agents.  So put that into your quiver, newbies!

Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate – Takeaway #1