The Wall Nobody's Rebuilding
Something happens when it goes wrong. Not that the property fails to sell — that's not really it. Not even that it sells for less than it should have, or that the vendor overpaid for the privilege.
What actually happens is another brick comes out of the wall holding the whole profession up. That wall is perceived trust, and while the decent agents keep laying bricks back in, somewhere else another one gets pulled straight back out — sometimes by the openly unscrupulous, more often by the well-meaning agent simply trying to be everything to everyone. That wall is looking distinctly unsteady right now.
Don't expect the vendor to fix it. Most know very little about how agencies actually operate, ask few of the right questions, and when they do land on a good one, often miss the nuance buried in the answer. No follow-up, no real interrogation — just a preconceived, largely negative view of the profession that no amount of advertising, social buzz, or clever SEO is ever going to shift. Attention brings enquiries. It also brings a vendor who's already wary before you've said a word.
Agents have to fix this themselves. Not through educating vendors — few actually want educating, they just want their home sold. If vendors can't reliably identify the right agent, agents need to get better at identifying the right vendor. Otherwise the whole thing keeps sliding downhill.
"Choosing the right vendors? We should be so lucky. Hunting down leads. Prospecting. Handing out business cards to anyone with a pulse. Hustle — that's an average day round here."
There's an entire cottage industry encouraging exactly that path, because it's how they earn their living. Half-baked ideas, often already discredited elsewhere, repackaged and resold. "Become a chameleon," one well-known agency trainer apparently likes to say — leaning on old-school DISC behavioural profiling to teach agents how to mirror whatever the vendor in front of them seems to want. Want it quick? Give them quick. Want detail? Bury them in comparables and metrics. Want flattery? Easy enough. Want reassurance? Even easier.
Here's what adapting your entire personality on demand actually signals to a perceptive vendor: you're not to be trusted, because you're clearly willing to become whoever wins the instruction. There's a longer conversation to be had about structured training, or whether other behavioural frameworks do the job better. But the honest version is simpler than any of it.
Vendors buy from someone they like. Not from a marginally improved performance of the agent you were yesterday. So why not give them an actual reason to like you? The Brand Within, illuminating the qualities that make you an actual human being rather than a role. Generous, humble, creative, persistent, dynamic, gregarious, precise, authentic, patient, bold, courageous, courteous — take your pick from the full spectrum.
Introverted, even. Not a label many agents readily claim, but there are plenty of introverted vendors out there, more comfortable in a low-stimulus conversation than a performance, quietly waiting for an agent who won't walk in as the life of the party. Show up like that regardless, and you'll likely lose them before you've said much of anything.
If the hat fits, wear it. Don't manufacture something you're not — vendors can smell it from the driveway. And when they choose someone else, it's rarely because you weren't competent, or your fee was too high, or your valuation too conservative. It's because they liked another agent more. Once liking becomes knowing, trust tends to follow as the next natural step, and from there, agent and vendor start working toward the same goal together, rather than one quietly managing the other.
The days of manipulation and unfulfilled promises passing for professionalism are running out, the same way fairground hucksters eventually ran out of road. You're better than that. Genuinely. Aren't you?
Don't expect much cheerleading for The Brand Within from inside the industry, though. Not from the coaches — you already own most of what it requires, which leaves them little to sell you. Not from the review-verification platforms, promising trust through a third party, when trust was always a two-way thing that never needed a third party involved. Not from most agents either, still hiding behind the safety of a corporate name, popping up for an hour at a time to sell vendors almost everything except the one thing they actually want to buy: the assurance that this particular agent genuinely gets them.
Get that right, and vendors stop ending up with the wrong agent. Slowly, then all at once, those bricks start forming a wall actually worth standing behind — an industry that's respected, trusted, even liked.
"If you're doing what everyone else is doing, it won't move you forward." — Seth Godin
Time to drop the competitive sales script, the shortcut, the quick fix, the constant need to prove you're the best. My bet is you're already a fairly well-developed human being, more capable than the industry's noise has led you to believe — just occasionally talked into ignoring it. Time to stop apologising for charging what the work is worth, and to drop the glamorous version of the story — the number-one agency, the more-passionate pitch, the better negotiator, the always-available superhuman. Time to be the one doing the choosing, for a change, rather than the one waiting to be chosen. There's considerably more joy in that, and a welcome exit from the endless cycle of comparison and rejection — working only with people who genuinely share what you value.
There's a polarisation coming, and it's already visible if you're looking. Those determined to be everything to everybody, and those willing to be specific. Bring it on. The sooner that split happens, the better for everyone, vendors included — more of them ending up with an agent they actually know, and the better they know that agent's character, the higher the odds of real affinity forming. Or not, in which case, better to find out early.
Either way, vendors stop landing with the wrong agent, and agents stop landing with the wrong vendor. A utopian picture, maybe. Still preferable to the alternative — a race to the bottom with no actual bottom in sight.
Here's the thing worth remembering about The Brand Within. It changes. It develops. Who I was six months ago isn't quite who I am now, and won't be who I am in another six. My values have mostly held steady. My beliefs have shifted here and there. My opinions stay open to argument. And the story woven through all of that carries more weight with a vendor than any star rating ever could.
— The Brand Within
Originally published on LinkedIn.