The Obstructed and Unobstructed View

- of Real Estate

I use the word intently, not accidentally, which is a very fancy way of saying I sat with a thesaurus for longer than a grown man should admit.

Because here is the thing I keep circling back to, the way your tongue keeps finding the one sore tooth: coaching, for all its whiteboards and wins and standing ovations at conference, is running interference — unnoticed, unannounced — on the one thing every single agent already owns outright. Free and clear. No franchise fee, no script, no script coach required.

Their identity.

The thing that cannot be copied, cloned, franchised, or sold back to them in a workbook with their own face slightly blurred on the cover.

The Obstructed World

In the obstructed world, an agent walks into a coaching room a whole, specific, slightly odd human being, and walks out sanded down into a more marketable shape. Same objection handlers. Same seven touches. Same voice notes that all sound like they were dictated by the same tired man in the same rented conference centre, because in a sense, they were.

I don't think anyone did this on purpose. I think it happened the way most obstructions happen: gradually, helpfully, one best-practice at a time, until the agent looks up one day and can't remember which parts of the pitch are actually theirs.

Oscar Wilde put it better than I ever will, in seven words that have outlived every coaching manual ever printed: "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

The obstructed world forgets that. It teaches agents to be a slightly better, slightly more rehearsed version of everyone else. Which is exhausting, and expensive, and also the opposite of what a client is actually shopping for, whether they'd ever say so out loud.

The Unobstructed World

The unobstructed world is much less impressive on a stage. There's no swelling music. There's just an agent who has quit apologising for being specific, and it doesn't look like a technique, because it isn't one.

You've likely seen two versions of it doing the rounds. One is the agent who stops writing the polished out-of-office and writes the true one instead — the one that admits they were up until four in the morning with a sick kid, that they're running on no sleep and less patience, that today is not a day for showing up as anyone's idea of professional. Not dressed up as a lesson. Not a tidy arc with a moral at the end. Just the actual, unglamorous truth of what the week looked like, offered without the usual apology.

The other is the agent who's simply stopped softening anything. No warm-up, no cushioning, no "just checking in" — straight to what needs saying, delivered the way they'd say it to a mate. Cut the BS.

Neither is a client-facing strategy dressed up as honesty. Both are just what happens when someone stops managing how they come across.

Because competence is everywhere now. Every agent can pull comps. Every agent can list on the portals. AI can do the paperwork faster than any of us and it will not need a coffee break or a pep talk to do it. What AI cannot do, and what no coaching program can install like a plugin, is a specific human being's particular way of caring about a specific human problem.

Michelangelo, when asked how he made David, is said to have answered that he simply removed everything that wasn't David. I love that line because it's the entire argument in one sentence, and because it makes me feel slightly better about how much of my own writing is just deleting the parts where I was showing off.

An agent's identity works the same way. It isn't built. It's uncovered, usually by removing the coaching-shaped stuff stacked on top of it.

It Has To Be About You First

Every coach in every conference room eventually leans into the microphone and says the line, gently, like a small scolding: "It's not about you, it's about the client." And every agent nods, because it sounds humble, and humility is an easy thing to sell.

But it isn't true, not in that order. It has to be about you first. Your history, your instincts, the particular way you've learned to notice what a room needs before anyone's said it out loud. Only once that's settled does the client get to walk in and feel, without being told, that they're standing in front of someone real. You cannot skip the first part and arrive honestly at the second.

Coaching skips the first part on purpose, because it's faster to hand someone a script than to sit with them until their actual self surfaces. Fast isn't the same as true. Clients feel the difference intuitively.

Why This Isn't a Metaphor

I want to be very frank here, because vague inspiration is its own kind of obstruction. The USP every agent already has is not their marketing, not their script, not their "brand colours." It is the fact that no one else on earth has lived their exact life, made their exact mistakes, and carries that history into a room the way only they can — not as a line they've rehearsed, but as who they simply, unavoidably are.

That cannot be coached into someone else. It can only be coached out of the person who already has it, which is, if you think about it for more than four seconds, a genuinely strange business model.

e.e. cummings wrote that to be nobody-but-yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else is the hardest battle any human can fight. He wasn't writing about real estate. He didn't need to be.

So here's my small, unglamorous suggestion, offered with the appropriate amount of self-doubt: stop sanding yourself down for the room. The identity you're trying to smooth over is the only inventory you've got that nobody can undercut, franchise, or replicate with a better algorithm.

It was never the balance wheel you were missing. It was permission to stay exactly, specifically, inconveniently yourself.

— Chris Arnold, The Brand Within

WhatsApp: +27 765358172

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Originally published on LinkedIn.