It's How Many Homes You Have Sold, NOT How Large Your Listing Inventory Is That Counts!

I had a call today from a potential seller who had found me via an internet search. He lives out-of-state and had some questions he wanted to ask. The very first one was, "How many listing do you currently have?" He seemed to put great importance on this fact.

It so happens that at the moment , I do not have a ton of listings. Why? Because I am a bad agent? Because I am lazy? Not at all. I have so few because I sell my listings relatively quickly. Often so fast I can not get them on agents' caravan since I do not have time enough to do so. In fact, I just closed on another one last week. Here in Zephyrhills, most agents work with both buyers and sellers, unlike some other areas where the agents concentrate most of their efforts on either one or the other.

I do this by pricing them correctly, working seven days a week, having good networks of "birddogs" in several subdivisions, having reasonable sellers, and excellent internet exposure.

I tried to explain to this seller that it is not the number of listings that you have that is definitive, but how many homes you have sold. For our franchise, I am consistently in the top 100 agents for central and northern Florida based on sales. Not bad in this market.

I also explained to him that I know lots of agents here in Zephyrhills and in other parts of the country who have long inventory lists of 20, 30, and 40+ homes. However, these same agents also complain constantly that they cannot find buyers for any of them. That could be due to their particular market, but it often is due to the fact that the homes are priced too high, are not advertised effectively, and/or have sellers who do not cooperate or negotiate in good faith. In my case, on several occasions I have turned down sellers who had unreasonable price demands. But other agents took them and a year later, there they sit on the market. Stale as last month's bread.

Just as agents do not rely heavily on the ACTIVE listings when we do CMAs and set a price, but instead we look to the sold listings, a seller needs to look to the sales record of each agent he is thinking of employing. The listing inventory is just an indicator of potential sales, many which may never take place. Solds are "money in the bank". Also, with less stale listings to service that means I can provide better assistance to those sellers who have homes in my current smaller inventory. That is very important to me, and my customers tell me constantly that they appreciate it.

As we used to say when I was a school administrator, "past performance is a good indicator of future performance." Getting listings is just half of the process. Getting the homes sold is the other AND the "better" half.