The record on the screen is longer than most. Alder Street, four bedrooms, first listed in June of last year with one brokerage at 589, reduced twice, expired in December. Relisted in January with a second brokerage at 549, reduced once, expired last week at 529. Fourteen months. Two signs. Two sets of photographs. The second set is noticeably better. And a seller who, when the phone connects, says the sentence before you have finished your name: “If this is about the house, I’ve heard it all, and I’m not interested in hearing it again.”<\/p>\n
That sentence has been said to forty agents in the last eight days, and most of them tried to get past it by explaining how they were different from the two that came before. Every one of those calls ended inside twenty seconds, because the seller has already heard two agents explain how they were different, and both of them were the two who failed.<\/p>\n
The history piece<\/a> says to read the record before the dial and to hold the theory. On a twice-expired listing the reading is richer and the theory is harder to hold, because there are two stories on the screen and they may not be the same story.<\/p>\n Two failures at descending prices with the same shape, a listing that sat, a cut, more sitting, is usually one failure twice: the price was wrong at 589 and it was still wrong at 549, and the second agent inherited a seller who had already decided that price was not the problem because the first agent had said it was. Two failures with different shapes, a badly marketed first listing with eight photographs and a well marketed second one that still did not sell, is a different reading, because it removes marketing as the explanation and leaves price standing alone, which the seller may now be ready to hear from someone who did not say it first.<\/p>\n Either way, the seller has spent fourteen months being told what was wrong by people who then failed to fix it, and their opening sentence is not hostility toward you. It is exhaustion. It is also a test.<\/p>\n Article 15 of the Code of Ethics<\/a> bars false or misleading statements about other real estate professionals, and on this call it does more than keep you honest. It keeps you from making the mistake the forty other agents made. “The other agents didn’t market it properly” is a guess dressed as a fact, and the seller, who sat through two listing presentations and watched two campaigns, knows more about what those agents did than you do. The moment you criticize them, you have joined a category the seller has learned to distrust, which is agents who explain other agents’ failures, and you have also, without meaning to, told the seller that the failure was not theirs, which is the belief that produced the second expiration.<\/p>\n So there is no differentiation on this call. Nothing about your marketing, your team, your track record. The seller does not want a third presentation. They want someone to ask them a question nobody has asked, and then be quiet.<\/p>\n The first is the expired script’s<\/a> diagnosis question, adapted to a seller who has two answers to give.<\/p>\n I’m not going to tell you what went wrong, because I wasn’t there and you were. Can I ask you what you think happened, the first time and the second time? And whether it was the same thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Then silence. Hold it. The last clause is the one that matters, because it invites the seller to compare the two failures, which most have not done out loud, and the comparison is where the truth surfaces. A seller who says “the first one didn’t do anything and the second one did everything and it still sat” has just told you it was price, in their own words, without you saying it. A seller who says “both of them told me to drop the price and I did and it didn’t help” has told you they cut too little, too late, twice, and that they still believe the cuts were the agents’ idea rather than the market’s.<\/p>\n The second question comes after the first has been fully answered, and it is not about listing.<\/p>\n If you were going to try a third time, and I’m not asking you to, what would have to be different for it to be worth it to you?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That question puts the seller in charge of the conditions, which after fourteen months of being told what to do is the first time anyone has. The answers sort the call. “Nothing, we’re done” is a real answer and the record closes with respect. “It would have to sell in sixty days” is a seller naming a timeline, which is the beginning of a price conversation. “I’d want to know the number was right before we started” is a seller who has arrived at the diagnosis and is asking for permission to say it.<\/p>\n When the second question opens it, the price conversation on a twice-expired listing is different from the one on a fresh expired, because the seller has data of their own. Fourteen months of carrying costs. Three reductions totaling sixty thousand dollars that each arrived after the market had already moved past the new number. A house that is now worth, by the street’s recent sales, something the seller has not let themselves calculate.<\/p>\n Do it in their numbers, the way the objections piece<\/a> does everything. What did they expect to net at 589. What have they paid to carry the house since June of last year. What would they net at the number the street actually supports now. How does that compare to what they would have netted at a correct price on day one. The math usually shows that the seller has already paid, in carrying costs and in the market’s movement, more than the gap between their price and the right one. That is a conclusion the seller can reach without being told, if the agent lays the numbers out and stops talking. It lands harder from their own mouth than from yours, and on this seller it is the only way it lands at all.<\/p>\n Do not name the right price on this call. Name the method. That is all. The number is for the appointment, with the comparables in front of them, and it should be the first thing on the table there rather than the last, because a seller who has expired twice cannot survive a third listing that starts high and works down.<\/p>\nWhy the third agent’s pitch fails before it starts<\/h2>\n
The two questions<\/h2>\n
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The price conversation, fourteen months in<\/h2>\n