MIND THE GAP

WELCOME

Hello and welcome!

It’s Easter week, and for the first time in a long time, I’m not hosting my usual client event at my house. Apologies in advance for not posting shots of me and the Easter Bunny. It’s Lucas’s birthday, so he and I are heading to Los Angeles to see the Lakers, the Clippers, and the Dodgers and I’m not missing that for anything!

Now, before I get on that plane, I want to talk about something I see agents struggling with every single day, and the issue is not what they think it is. There’s a perception that they have a time problem, but that’s not it. The issue is with alignment. And until they get honest about that, no planner, no system, no “time blocking” is going to fix what’s actually going on in their business. So let’s get right into it!

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

The Alignment Gap

Not a week goes by where I don’t hear a new agent say, “Oh, Glennda, I’d love to do X, Y, or Z, but there just aren’t enough hours in the days.” When I was first starting out, this was me, too. I had so much going on and I didn’t know how to manage it all. I figured I just needed to manage my time better.

However, now that I’ve been selling real estate since Jesus was a baby, I can say this: overwhelmed agents don’t have a time problem. Oh, no. They have a decision problem. And if you’ve been in this business awhile, y’all know exactly what I mean, especially when it comes to buyers.

Early on, I had no idea how to tell the difference between someone who was a real buyer and someone who just liked looking at houses. Let me tell you, there are a whole lot of folks who are in the “just like looking at houses” camp. Instead of going through specific criteria to find a home, they’re building a vision board and trying to picture their life inside of it. Now, if something absolutely perfect were to fall in their laps, sure, they’d consider buying it. Maybe. But until then, I was their Saturday entertainment. Josh Flagg talks about this in his book The Deal. He worked with an older gentleman who was wealthy as could be, so he could absolutely afford everything Josh showed him. But that guy could never pull the trigger when something seemingly perfect came up and Josh couldn’t figure out why. Finally, Josh’s grandmother Edith sat Josh down and said, “The only place this man is moving to is the cemetery.”

I had a couple like that many years ago. (Let’s call them Bobby and Susie.) I showed Bobby and Susie hundreds—no lie—of houses over the years. The heavens somehow parted and I found a house that was perfect for them, and I do mean perfect. This place checked every box in spades. I’m talking primary on the main, pool already there, the right neighborhood, and practically turnkey. This home was everything Bobby and Susie had told me they wanted at the price they wanted to pay. So we’re standing in the kitchen, and I’m thinking, Whew, this is it! This is the one. Finally! And then Bobby looked at me and said, “Eh, I’m just not sure.”

I think I may have snapped because I told Susie, “If y’all don’t make an offer on this house, it will be easier for you to find a new husband than it will be to find a new home.” That’s the moment I realized I wasn’t dealing with a housing problem. I was dealing with a gap. There was a gap between their expectations and reality that I could not fill for them. No amount of showing, explaining, negotiating, or time was going to fix it.

You see, this is where agents get themselves into trouble. We think if we just keep working, keep showing, keep trying, eventually we’ll land the plane. But this isn’t about our efforts. It’s about alignment. If the alignment isn’t there, all the effort in the world won’t save us.

Now here’s where it gets expensive in terms of our time and commitment. I know firsthand that the longer we work with someone like that, the harder it is to walk away. We can’t help but think about how much of ourselves we’ve already invested. I mean, the weekends, the evenings, hell, the gas money! And that’s not to mention the cognitive load of carrying these people around in our damn heads. But we’re conditioned to try to win, so we don’t want to “lose” them to another agent. So, we stay in it. And in it… and in it. This is how our time gets decided for us.

Out of thousands of homes sold, I’ve had two buyers where I can honestly say there was nothing I could have done to make them happy. I showed seventy-one houses to the first lady. Seventy-one. From one end of the city to the other. I’m not kidding. We looked at homes from Dallas to Dacula. (If y’all know anything about Atlanta traffic, this just gave you palpitations. It would have been quicker to drive to Michigan.) This lady ended up buying a house no one in her family liked and she blamed me for it. She says I forced her into it. Obviously, that’s not true, yet I knew the minute she wrote the offer that she was buying out of desperation. The homes not purchased with conviction are always the ones that come back to bite you (meaning me) in the butt.

The hard-won truth here is that some people are never going to be buyers. And some of these people are never going to be happy. Our job is to be able to clock this as quickly as possible, which all comes down to asking the right question. Most agents will say something like, “What’s it going to take for you to buy this house?” No, ma’am, that’s the wrong question. It's wrong because you’re negotiating hypotheticals you can’t control, namely price, concessions, conditions.

The magic lies in asking the right question. So the real question is, “What happens if you don’t buy?” This is where you’ll find the truth. If nothing happens if they don’t buy, if their life doesn’t change, if there’s no consequence to waiting, they’re not buying. Not only are they not buying today, there’s a good chance they’re not buying ever.

However, if they say something like, “Ugh, then we’re stuck in this terrible rental another year,” or “Our costs are going up,” or “We’re missing out on equity,” well, now you’ve got something real to work with. It’s human nature for people to not move toward pleasure nearly as quick as they move away from pain. Once you understand that, you start making better decisions with your time.

Here’s the part that’s actually exciting: in the old days, we had to physically take people everywhere to suss all of this out. There was no other way. Used to be, there was only one photo on a listing. There was no map and you couldn’t get a sense of the street, the neighbors, the layout, etc. Until you pulled up out front, you didn’t know if the house next door had three cars in the driveway until you saw it with your own eyeballs. I used to send people out with a map book and say, “Go drive by first,” because that was the only filter we had.

Back then, even with serious buyers with real pain points and a driving need, I might have shown them fifty houses before we got to the one. Fifty damn houses. That’s because the process demanded it. We didn’t have technological efficiencies yet. Fortunately, that’s all different now.

I love that my buyers can see everything before they ever step foot inside a home. They can walk through a house virtually, asking questions and having them answered in real time. They can measure spaces, compare layouts, and understand the flow. Oh my stars, they can even strip the furniture out and look at the bones of the house! It used to be our job was to help them imagine what their life could be like there if they were to, say, knock down that wall and open up the space. But now with a click, they can figure out if a king bed fits, how tall the ceilings are, and what the kitchen really looks like without someone else’s MacKenzie Childs ceramics collection all over it. Plus, buyers can compare one home to another without spending their entire Saturday in the backseat of my car.

The process of elimination is now online, not onsite, and this is a game-changer. As agents, instead of spending our time ruling things out, we’re spending our time moving things forward. We’re not covering those surface-level questions over and over again. Instead, we get to have those higher-level conversations about value, risk, timing, and strategy. The days of being a tour guide are over; we’re in our trusted advisor era now. 

I love that the agent is no less important, given all the new tools. Actually, we get to be more important in the areas where it counts. All the busywork, like the endless driving, the opening doors, the explaining what could go where is being handled earlier in the process. By the time a buyer reaches out, they’re more informed and more intentional. Spoiler alert: intentional buyers don’t waste our time.

Buyers no longer need to be taken to twenty houses to figure out what they want. They’ve already done the work to narrow it down. They show up ready to make decisions, not just gather information, which makes the conversations we have completely different.

The biggest time drain has never been the work itself. We’ve all lost countless hours to misalignment, whether it’s showing the wrong houses or chasing down the wrong criteria. The more that gets filtered out upfront and the more clarity buyers have before they ever pick up the phone, the less time gets wasted on both sides. That’s why I could not be more excited about the new Homes.com Ai tools!

So no, it’s not that we don’t have enough hours in the day. The issue has always been a decision problem. What’s so exciting is that the better the information gets, the faster our buyers can make the right decisions.

GLENNDAISM

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

The Center of Buckhead

Let me share something about Buckhead; people don’t just buy here for the square footage. Oh, no. They buy here for the lifestyle that comes with the address. Unit 1013 at Ovation I at 3040 Peachtree Road NW in Atlanta drops you right in the middle of it without asking you to pay a million dollars for the privilege!

This condo is steps from the St. Regis, across from Buckhead Village, and surrounded by the kind of restaurants, shopping, and nightlife that make a random Tuesday feel like an occasion. Grab coffee, meet friends for dinner, pop into a boutique, and be back home before your car even cools down. (If you bother to use it at all.) That’s the magic of this location: everything you want is right outside your door. The best part is that when you come home, you’ve got a quiet little courtyard-facing retreat that feels like you’ve slipped out of the chaos. Buckhead done right is access when you want it, peace when you need it, and a price point that frankly doesn’t make sense for what you’re getting!