Would you meet your lawyer in court right before opening arguments ?
How do people even chose these people? I get it ..... but I don't
I scrolled past it this morning on LinkedIn.
Polished. Clean. A client note folded into a paragraph about process. The word preparation doing the heavy lifting. The promise that a buyer never had to wonder what comes next. The sense that someone had everything handled from contract to close.
I have seen this post a hundred times. Different agents, same architecture. And every time I read one, I think about Bill.
The Day Bill Showed Up Early
I was the listing agent on a $5,200,000 property. Our team was there ahead of the showing, doing what we do before a buyer walks through a home at that level. The details that make a luxury property feel like a luxury property on the day it matters are not accidental. They are prepared for. That is the work nobody posts about.
The buyer showed up early.
He walked in, extended his hand, looked me in the eye, and said his agent’s name. Not mine. He thought I was his representative. He had never met the person he hired to guide him through the most significant purchase of his life. Not once. Not even before arriving at a $5,200,000 showing.
I will fly to Rochester to have lunch with a client before we ever look at a home together. Not because the transaction requires it. Because the relationship does. You know someone before you need to know them. You are invested before the stakes ask you to be.
Bill had never seen his agent’s face. Pat may or may not do anything with us. But I sensed a shared connection on food and my next article on this subject will be a report on the food. I am sure he will appreciate my follow through. I will like the sandwich.
Somewhere, that agent has a great post about preparation.
Table Stakes and What Comes After Them
When everything goes right, anyone can look competent. The inspection is clean, the title is clear, the market cooperates, and the agent sends a gracious note about being one step ahead. That is table stakes. That is weather. It requires nothing extraordinary. It only requires that nothing went wrong.
What separates a real team from a performance operation is what happens when things do not go right. When the inspection uncovers something that needs to be restructured quietly before it becomes a crisis. When the appraisal comes in light and the deal needs to be rebuilt from the middle. When a buyer is emotionally committed to a home that the numbers say to walk away from and someone has to be the one to tell them that.
Those moments do not make good posts. They are quiet, uncomfortable, and deeply technical. They require judgment that cannot be scripted and relationships that cannot be purchased from a lead database.
That is when strategy and action separate the professionals from the performers.
When things go right, anyone can pretend. Watch what happens when they don’t.
When the World Is Upside Down
Here is what actually bothers me.
Not that the polished post exists. That it works.
The agents writing those posts are not always lying. They are doing something more corrosive than lying. They are borrowing the language of real practice and wearing it like a costume. They have studied what competence sounds like. They have learned the vocabulary. Preparation. Process. One step ahead. And they have learned that most clients cannot tell the difference between the words and the thing the words are supposed to describe.
So the performance gets clients. The bought leads become closings. The testimonials accumulate. And somewhere the person doing the quiet, unglamorous, relationship-first work is watching that happen from a listing they prepared alone before anyone arrived.
I post on TikTok because I believe authenticity matters. I write here because I think it finds its audience. But I will not pretend the scoreboard always agrees with me.
If the costume beats the craft, if the script beats the relationship, if Bill can mistake a stranger for his representative at a $5,200,000 showing and that agent still gets to post about preparation the following week, then we have a problem that goes well beyond real estate.
We just keep doing the work. And we keep telling you what it actually looks like.