Can you circle prospect if you do not have a listing?<\/p>\n
Yes, and most circle prospecting is done that way. In any neighborhood you might farm, the number of transactions you personally close in a year is small, and the number that close is not. If you only called around your own signs, you would call the farm twice a year and never build anything. The event that justifies a circle call is the transaction, and the transaction is public whether or not your name was on it.<\/p>\n
What changes without the listing is one line of the script and one rule you have to respect. The line is the credential. The rule is that you cannot say you sold it.<\/p>\n
The circle prospecting script<\/a> carries exactly one credential: “I was the agent on it.” It is true, it is checkable, and it is the reason the neighbor keeps listening past the first sentence. Without the listing, that sentence is gone, and the temptation is to replace it with something that sounds close enough.<\/p>\n The scripts in circulation do exactly that. “We just sold your neighbor’s home.” “Our office had so much interest in the house down the street.” “We had several buyers who missed out.” If you were not the listing broker or the cooperating broker on that sale, every one of those is a claim you are not entitled to make. Standard of Practice 12-7 under Article 12 of the Code of Ethics<\/a> reserves the word for the brokers who were in the transaction: only they may claim to have sold the property. A neighbor who later learns that the sign on the lawn belonged to a different brokerage has learned that your first sentence was false, and in a farm that story travels.<\/p>\n So drop the credential and do not replace it with a borrowed one. Replace it with the truth, which is that you work the street.<\/p>\n Hi, is this the homeowner on Maple Court? My name is [your name], I’m an agent with [your brokerage], and I’ll tell you exactly why I’m calling. The house at number 14, a few doors from you, closed last week. It wasn’t my sale, but I work this neighborhood and I keep track of what sells here, and the neighbors usually want to know what it went for and what that means for their own place. I’d rather tell you directly than have you hear a rumor. Would that be useful to you, or would you rather I didn’t?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Three things happened in that paragraph that the borrowed-credential version cannot do.<\/p>\n “It wasn’t my sale” is said before the neighbor can wonder. You have volunteered the one fact that a dishonest caller would hide, and the neighbor notices. It costs you nothing, because the neighbor did not care whose sign it was. They care what the house went for.<\/p>\n “I work this neighborhood and I keep track of what sells here” is the replacement credential, and it is the right one for a farm, because it is the thing you are actually building. The agent who sold number 14 may never call this street again. You will. Say so.<\/p>\n The ask is unchanged. Permission to send a note on what sells nearby, every couple of months, with no call attached. The second call<\/a> is still the real one, and the note is still what earns it.<\/p>\n The closed price is the value of the call, and you have to know where yours came from and whether you can share it.<\/p>\n In most states the sale price is on the recorded deed or the transfer tax stamp, which makes it public record, and you can state it to anyone. In the dozen or so non-disclosure states, the deed does not show the price, and the figure you have came from the MLS. Your MLS’s rules govern what members may share from its sold data with people who are not clients, and those rules vary. Know which kind of state you are in and what your MLS permits before you quote a number on the phone. If you cannot state the figure, you can still say the house closed, when it went under contract, how long it took, and what it was listed at, and you can offer to walk the neighbor through what that implies for their own home in a conversation rather than a number.<\/p>\n Either way, say what the source is if asked. “It’s on the recorded deed” or “it’s in the MLS, which agents have access to” is a complete answer, and it is one more place where the honest version is also the simpler one.<\/p>\n Calling neighbors about a new listing down the street is a general canvass of the neighborhood, and Standard of Practice 16-2 treats a call to all the prospects in a geographic area as general rather than targeted. The neighbors are not the other broker’s clients. The seller is.<\/p>\n That draws the line for you. Do not call the seller of the listed home, do not knock on that door, and do not use what you learned from the MLS about that listing to approach the seller with a better offer, which is what Standard of Practice 16-3 forbids. Calling the twenty homes around it to say a house on their street came on the market this week, listed with another brokerage, is a different act, and it is the ordinary business of a farm.<\/p>\n Keep the description factual and brief. “Number 14 went on the market Tuesday at four eighty-nine, listed with another office.” Do not editorialize about the price, the agent or the marketing. The neighbor may be friends with the seller, and anything you say about that listing will be repeated at the mailbox.<\/p>\n Every row offers the neighbor a fact about their street. None of them requires you to have been in the deal, and none of them lets you imply that you were.<\/p>\nThe script without a listing<\/h2>\n
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What you can say about the price<\/h2>\n
The other agent’s active listing<\/h2>\n
Four events you can borrow<\/h2>\n
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\n \nEvent<\/th>\n Whose it is<\/th>\n What you can honestly say<\/th>\n What you cannot<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n \n Just sold<\/td>\n Another brokerage<\/td>\n It closed, when, and the price if public or permitted<\/td>\n That you or your office sold it, or had buyers for it<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Just listed<\/td>\n Another brokerage<\/td>\n It is on the market, the list price, that it is listed with another office<\/td>\n Anything about the seller’s motivation; any contact with the seller<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Price reduction<\/td>\n Another brokerage<\/td>\n The list price changed and by how much<\/td>\n Speculation about why, or about the listing agent<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Open house<\/td>\n Another brokerage<\/td>\n It is open Saturday, as advertised<\/td>\n That you are hosting it or are involved in it<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n Why this is how farms get built<\/h2>\n