Be Their Favorite

Real estate has one game everyone agrees to play. Be the best. Sell the most homes. Win the most reviews. Charge the sharpest fee, or justify the highest one. Out-market the agent down the road. It is a competition, and competitions have a scoreboard, and a scoreboard demands you keep comparing yourself to whoever else is on the board.

Jay Acunzo has a line that quietly dismantles the whole exercise: don't be the best, be their favorite. It sounds like a rebrand of the same ambition. It isn't. It's a different game entirely, played with different rules, won by different people.

Best is a ranking. Favorite is a relationship. Best requires everyone else to be worse than you. Favorite requires nothing of anyone else at all.

If I was offered free tickets to see Beyoncé, I'd give them away. But I would pay to see Tina Turner.

That isn't a comment on talent. Beyoncé is, by any measure, extraordinary. But a favorite isn't chosen by measure. She's chosen by feel — the way an artist's energy lands on you, the era she soundtracked, the version of yourself you were the first time you heard her. None of that shows up on a scoreboard. All of it decides who gets your money and who gets a polite decline.

Coco Chanel understood this before marketing had a word for it: "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." Not better. Different. Better is a comparison you can lose the moment someone undercuts your fee or outspends your marketing budget. Different is a comparison nobody else can even enter, because it was never about you being superior. It was about you being unmistakably, specifically you.

It is the same with the person a homeowner chooses to sell their house. Nobody hires an agent because they moved more property last quarter than the next name on the list. They hire them because something about the way that agent showed up felt right. The directness. The energy. The way they listened, or didn't waste time, or told the truth when it would have been easier not to. Not the highest sale price. Not the lowest fee. The tone.

Here is the part that makes most agents flinch: becoming somebody's favorite requires you to stop trying to become everybody's favorite. The moment you round off your edges to appeal to the whole market, you stop being distinct to anyone in it. You end up sounding like the agent next door, who sounds like the one after that, who sounds like every training manual they were all handed. Trying to appeal to everyone is how you become nobody's favorite at all.

That takes two things most agents skip in the rush to compete. The first is self-awareness — actually knowing what your energy is, what your tone is, what you stand for when nobody's coaching you on the script. The second is harder: you have to stop comparing yourself to the agent across the street, and stop competing for the deal on their terms. Comparison keeps you inside a game you can only ever tie or lose. Favorite status was never being contested in the first place.

The agents who last aren't the ones who won the comparison this quarter. They're the ones a client would choose again without a second thought, and tell a friend to choose too. That's not a ranking. That's loyalty. And loyalty, unlike being the best, doesn't expire the moment somebody cheaper or louder shows up.

Tina Turner. Not because she's simply the best singer, or a better entertainer than the rest. In my world, she's favorite.

Be worth knowing, not simply well known.

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Originally published on LinkedIn.