The Best-Practice Trap

The Real Estate Coaching Blindspot

Estate agency has a template problem. Coaches hold up successful agents as models of achievement — and quietly bury the backstory. The result? A profession full of people trying to be someone else. And wondering why nobody can tell them apart.

Jay Acunzo puts it plainly: "Best-practice produces commodity work." He is not against learning from others. His point is more precise than that — and more damaging to the coaching model. Study what works for someone else, take what's useful, adapt it to your own style, discard the rest. The best-practice observation becomes a tip, not a template. A prompt for your own thinking, not a substitute for it.

The coaching industry does the opposite. It takes what worked for one agent, in one market, at one moment in time — and presents it as a system to be installed. The adaptation step, the most important step, the step that requires you to actually know yourself, is quietly removed. What remains is instruction. And instruction, followed faithfully, produces agents who all sound like a slightly inferior version of the same person.

What The Template Conceals

Here is how it works. A coach identifies an agent who has built something impressive — a dominant patch, a loyal database, a listing conversion rate that makes other agents wince with envy. The coach studies that agent, extracts their habits, their scripts, their morning routines, their social media cadence. Then they package it. They call it a system. They sell it as the path.

And ten thousand agents buy it. Because the story is compelling, the results are real, and the promise is seductive: do what they did, get what they have.

The backstory, though, is never part of the package.

The agent who built that dominant patch spent eleven years doing it. They made enemies, lost clients, mispriced properties, and survived a market collapse that would have finished most people. Their database is loyal because they showed up — visibly, consistently, personally — through cycles of personal difficulty that would never appear in a keynote slide. Their conversion rate is high because buyers and sellers in their area have absorbed, over time, a felt sense of who this person is. Not what they do. Who they are.

None of that is transferable. None of it fits inside a module.

"Do what they did, get what they have" is the oldest confidence trick in professional development. It works because it sounds like logic.

The Brand Within

What is transferable — and what gets sold — is the surface. The scripts. The prospecting sequence. The listing presentation format. The follow-up cadence. And agents apply these things faithfully, sometimes obsessively, and find that the results bear no resemblance to the promised outcome. So they conclude they must be doing it wrong. They buy more training. They attend another seminar. They look for a better template.

The template was never the point. The person behind it was.

The Differentiation Paradox

Here is the central contradiction that the coaching industry has never answered for. Agents are told, simultaneously, that they must differentiate themselves in a crowded market — and that they should follow a proven best-practice system developed by someone else. These two instructions cannot coexist. You cannot differentiate yourself by becoming a version of another person. It is not possible.

And yet every week, in training rooms and on webinar screens across the country, agents are shown the agent they should aspire to be. They are shown that person's videos, their branding, their door-knocking strategy, their tone of voice. They are asked to imagine themselves doing the same things in the same way.

The coaching industry's implicit message, stripped of its motivational packaging, is this: don't be yourself. Be like this person.

Best practice assumes that context is irrelevant. That what worked in a commuter-belt market in 2019 will work in a post-industrial northern town in 2025. That the agent who thrives on cold-calling will produce the same results as the agent who cannot make a cold call without feeling physically ill. That consumer behaviour is a constant. That trust is a technique.

It assumes, above all, that the identity of the agent doing the work is a variable that can simply be swapped out. Like changing a battery.

What Actually Works

Iveta Degulyte writes that information is now so easily accessible, so abundant, so contradictory, that personal judgement has become the scarce resource. She is right. And in estate agency, that judgement is built from two things the coaching industry cannot sell: character, which is who you are — and wisdom, which is what your experience has made of you.

They are not the same thing. You can have strong character and poor wisdom. You can also have accumulated wisdom and a character that undermines it. The coaching industry sells neither. It sells the appearance of both, borrowed from someone else's story.

The agents who differentiate do not differentiate because they found a better script. They differentiate because buyers and sellers cannot help noticing that this particular person is different from every other agent they have encountered. The difference is not methodological. It is existential. It is character made visible over time.

The Cloning Problem

Walk into any estate agency office in any major UK town and ask the agents how they differentiate themselves. Most will reach, eventually, for the same handful of words. Professional. Experienced. Local knowledge. Five-star reviews. These are not differentiators. They are the minimum expected of anyone operating in the field. They are the things that every agent trained on the same best-practice curriculum will produce when asked to describe themselves.

The curriculum produced the answer. And the answer sounds exactly like everyone else's answer. Because it came from the same place.

This is not a training problem. It is a philosophy problem. The coaching model is built on imitation. Imitation, by definition, cannot produce distinction. And distinction — not skill, not system, not process — is the only thing that makes a specific agent the only logical choice for a specific client.

The agent who sounds like every other agent is competing on price. The agent who sounds like themselves is not competing at all.

The Question The Industry Won't Ask

Every best-practice framework rests on a hidden assumption: that what works for one person will work for another, because the underlying mechanics of human behaviour are consistent enough to make the method more important than the person deploying it.

Consumer research does not support this. Behavioural psychology does not support this. Neither does the lived experience of any agent who has faithfully applied a system they were sold and found it generating a fraction of the results it produced for someone else. What the research does support — consistently, across disciplines — is that trust is relational, that relationships are character-dependent, and that character cannot be installed.

The coaching industry will not ask the question that follows from this, because the question undermines the product. The question is: what if the only system that works for you is the one that emerges from who you actually are?

If that is true — and the evidence suggests it is — then the entire best-practice model collapses. Not as a source of useful information, but as a substitute for identity. Useful information, absorbed and filtered through a specific agent's own character and judgement, can sharpen practice. Acunzo's version of best practice — treat it as a tip, adapt it or discard it, let it serve your thinking rather than replace it — is how knowledge should move through a professional. But a system copied wholesale from someone else, applied without personalisation, severed from the individuality that made it work in its original context, does not sharpen practice. It erases the one thing the agent had that nobody else could replicate.

It erases them.

And agents wonder why they cannot differentiate.

Originally published on LinkedIn.