Eleven years.<\/p>\n
That is the median time a home seller in NAR’s 2025 Profile had owned the home before selling it, the longest on record (NAR, 2025 Profile takeaways<\/a>). Hold it next to the way most agents treat a seller lead. A homeowner who says “not this year” in March is marked dead by September, dropped from the CRM by the following spring, and calls a different agent four years later when the timeline that was always going to be long finally arrives. The lead was never dead. The agent’s attention was.<\/p>\n The question of when to stop following up has a precise answer, and it has nothing to do with a count of touches or months. Four events end a seller record. Everything else, including every version of “not now,” changes the cadence rather than ending it, and the skill is in letting the cadence decay to match the horizon the homeowner described instead of either hammering the record or abandoning it.<\/p>\n They listed with another broker.<\/strong> The moment a lead signs a listing agreement with someone else, they are exclusively represented, and Standard of Practice 16-4 of the Code of Ethics<\/a> bars you from soliciting the listing. The record closes with the date and the broker. It does not go in the trash, because listings expire, and an expired that was once your lead is a warmer expired than a stranger’s. It goes into a closed state with a note to check status when the listing term would end.<\/p>\n They sold.<\/strong> The house closed, with someone or by owner. The record closes as sold, with the date, and the homeowner moves to a different list entirely: a past contact who now owns a different home, or none, and who knows an agent who did not pester them. That is a referral source, not a seller lead, and it is worked on a different cadence.<\/p>\n They gave a hard no with a decision behind it.<\/strong> “We’ve decided to stay.” “We’re leaving it to the kids.” “We refinanced for thirty years last month.” These are decisions, not moods, and the respectful response is to close the record with their words on it. A hard no differs from a soft one in that it contains a reason that would have to change for the answer to change. If the reason is one that time alone will not touch, the record closes.<\/p>\n They asked you to stop.<\/strong> The internal do-not-call request under 47 CFR 64.1200(d)<\/a> ends the calling permanently, for five years at minimum and in practice forever, across every list and every channel you choose to include. The circle prospecting objections<\/a> piece treats this as an instruction, and it is the only one of the four that is about you rather than about the sale.<\/p>\n Those four, and nothing else. Read the list again and notice what is missing: no answer, voicemail, “not interested,” “not now,” “maybe next year,” “call me in the spring,” and every other outcome that agents routinely use to justify dropping a record. None of those is an ending. Each is a cadence instruction.<\/p>\n A soft no carries a horizon, and the follow-up cadence should thin out to match it rather than either continuing at the original pace or ending. The FSBO follow-up plan<\/a> runs seven touches in sixty days because the seller named a sixty-day horizon. A homeowner who says “not until the kids finish school, so three years” has named a thirty-six-month horizon, and seven touches in sixty days would be an assault. Two touches a year, each tied to something real, is the right density, and the record should say so.<\/p>\n The reason decay works and stopping does not is math. A contact costs a few minutes. A record that is closed costs nothing and produces nothing. A record that decays to an annual check-in costs a few minutes a year and remains in the running for a listing that, on the tenure data, is more likely to arrive in year four than in month four. Over a book of a few hundred soft-no records, the annual cadence produces listings every year from leads that the “eight touches and out” approach would have deleted.<\/p>\nThe four events that end a record<\/h2>\n
Decay, do not stop<\/h2>\n