To Trust That You Are More Than Enough As You Are?
Part 1 of 3 — Why Agents Feel The Need To Manipulate Potential Clients
Somewhere between the pitch and the profile, agents stopped trusting themselves. Not their scripts. Themselves.
You can hear it in the language now doing the rounds. Not "understand your client." "Decode" your client. Not "build rapport." "Engineer affinity." The words have changed because the intent behind them has changed. This isn't about knowing someone. It's about performing the appearance of knowing someone, quickly enough to close before they notice the difference.
Simon Gates, UK estate agency influencer, is on a mission to become the most useful person UK estate agents follow. That's a good mission. Useful is a high bar, and most of what passes for advice in this industry doesn't clear it. But usefulness has a shadow side: chase it hard enough and you start recommending whatever performs, not whatever's true. Recently, that's meant amplifying Tom Panos and the psychometric profiling tools he's built into his pre-meeting routine — software that reads a prospect before the agent has said a word.
Used to build self-awareness, profiling is a mirror. Used to manufacture affinity in someone else, it's a mask wearing a smile.
Here's the distinction nobody in that conversation is making. Run a psychometric tool on yourself and you learn something real: how you communicate under pressure, where your blind spots sit, what you default to when a listing goes quiet. That's character work. It costs you something, because it asks you to look at yourself, not the client sitting across the table.
Run the same tool on a prospect, and use it to open with "I can tell you're someone who values directness" — and you've done something else entirely. You've manufactured the feeling of being understood without doing the work of understanding. The client isn't wrong to warm to it. Feeling seen is a real need, and a well-run profile can fake the sensation convincingly. That's precisely the problem. Insincerity doesn't announce itself. It shows up dressed as intimacy.
On a mission to become the most useful person to follow for UK estate agents.— Simon Gates
Tom Ferry sells the same instinct at a different volume. Different market, same premise: the agent isn't enough on their own, so buy the system that makes them seem like more. Panos brings the tooling. Gates brings the platform. Neither is the villain here — they're both, in their own telling, trying to be useful to an industry that keeps asking to be rescued. The problem isn't the men. It's the appetite they're feeding.
Because underneath every "decode your client" workshop sits a quieter, sadder question: why doesn't the agent trust that who they already are is enough to earn the listing? Why does authentic curiosity about a stranger's life need a piece of software to manufacture it? An agent who has to be told what a prospect values, by an algorithm, thirty seconds before the meeting, has already answered the question in the title of this piece. And the answer is no.
Part 2, tomorrow, asks what happens to the client on the other side of that manufactured affinity — and why they usually know, at some unnamed level, that something about the meeting didn't add up.
Character can't be engineered by software. It can only be uncovered. Start with who you actually are →
Be worth knowing, not simply well known.
Originally published on LinkedIn.