Take your sales game to the next level with therapist-approved methods
By thinking like a therapist, realtors can improve relationships with their clients and move from point of contact to closing faster
Before she sold her first home, my client thought the real estate grind would be easy. The housing market in South Florida was booming and everyone in her office enjoyed success. Olivia was an ambitious mid-20s realtor who came to see me after a breakup. But as we worked through grief issues she discussed frustrations with clients who could never settle on a dream home. Nine months into her career she’d never made it to closing and was scraping by on rentals.
“I’m burnt out and dreading my clients,” Olivia said. “People fall in love with gorgeous homes and suddenly decide it isn’t the right time to move. After dozens of weekends I am more like an unpaid tour guide than a realtor.”
My therapeutic ear heard a lot in these defeated words. We could explore how feeling rejected by her boyfriend may be seeping into her relationship with her clients via projection. We could alleviate burnout symptoms with targeted interventions such as installing better sleep habits and activating a support network that validates her emotions.
But my eyes knew someone was missing from our session. Who was that? Her clients!
Their behaviors reminded me of therapeutic resistance: that is, behaviors either emerging from the client’s conscious or unconscious that prevent them from growing. Clients get stuck in the face of change because it is daunting and unpredictable. A resistant client will cancel sessions, avoid homework assignments, or stick to small-talk to avoid emotionally hefty conversations.
Real estate transactions are a prime place for a mix of intense emotions like grief and fear.
For realtors their clients have many issues that impede them from literally moving to another place. The realtor must not only help sell and buy homes but emotionally manage and guide their clients through a rocky, uncertain transition, much like a therapist does.
By exploring real estate sales through a therapeutic lens we can improve relationships with clients, identify as an emotionally-focused realtor best suited to serve them, and move them through point of contact to closing faster.
The First Phone Call Indicates a Desire for Change: The Emotionally-Intelligent Realtor Praises That and Believes in Their Ability as a Change Agent
Before a client sees me they’ve undergone many Herculean tasks. They’ve suffered depression, anxiety, trauma, and other mental health issues for what seems like forever. They want change but they don’t know who can help them. They contact therapists and hit dead-end voicemails and automated email responses. All along the way these clients question, “Do I really even need therapy?”
Many give up at this point. Some avoid my followup responses.
If I do connect with a potential client they’re often tending to their families or job and are jolted into talking to a stranger about problems they would rather avoid. If they do schedule an appointment they are then expected to keep the appointment after ruminating on it for a week. When they arrive at my office and sit on my couch they’ve braved traffic, the tyranny of Google maps, and the labyrinthian layout of office parking lots.
For a client to withstand that I can safely assume they want to change. A client’s ability for self-healing begins before they even meet me.
When I reminded Olivia about her own journey to my office she remarked that therapy was something she wished to do before her breakup. I told her, “Like you, your clients want change. They’ve gone through all the trouble of contacting you. Even as they muck up that process by avoiding the MLS and forgetting to fill out paperwork, you must put your own frustrations aside and remind yourself that they believed in you enough to do this work. Your job is to remind them that they hired you to get them out of one house and into another. Only through gauging their emotional resistance will you be able to do that. That starts with understanding them and not rushing them.”
Just as clients ask if they really need therapy they ask if they really need a realtor. Why do realtors exist?
Realtors exist because people have difficulty as solo operators during the home sales process. A realtor’s clients are naive to pricing, investing, neighborhood identities, and financial paperwork, and with that uncertainty comes stress and all the inborn reactions that go along with it. The very function of the realtor is to absorb that anxiety by establishing rapport with the client and installing the appropriate interventions to meet the goal of closing. As we will see a client might not understand that is the role of the realtor, but it is what the emotionally-intelligent realtor should aspire to be: a manager of relationships, transition, and anxiety.
Regular assessment is a more effective change agent than a rush to intervention according to Patrick M. DeCarlo, a marriage counselor in Florida.
The Emotionally-Intelligent Realtor Is An Expert Assessor
In therapy, clients are more than their diagnosis. They’re parents, sons and daughters, workers, someone’s spouse, artists, dreamers, and spiritual seekers. For a realtor they must view their clients as something more than a closing. I asked Olivia what she knew about her clients, what are their dreams for their new house, their fears in leaving behind the home they’ve outgrown, how they imagine their lives turning out in a new neighborhood.
Olivia looked puzzled: “I have no idea. I know whether they want a garage or an enclosed patio.”
In the therapeutic process change comes through a therapist-client relationship where the client feels heard and understood. Sure, I can throw one evidence-based intervention after another at my client. But if I haven’t established rapport with them as a trusted advisor they will not follow through on my suggestions.
This requires genuine curiosity in the people you are serving. Clients don’t live in these homes, people do. And people do wildly interesting things and it’s your job to ask interesting questions about who they are.
For instance, I once supervised a therapist struggling with a client who offered clipped responses and limited insight. My supervisee said, “We’ve literally spent most of the session staring at each other.”
I knew the client was recently married and asked, “What do you know about her wedding? Have you ever tried to set up the menu for a wedding? There’s all these tastings from the caterer and a lot of work goes into what eventually turns into a simple question from the waitstaff: ‘Chicken or fish?’ How’d your client cater their wedding?”
My supervisee looked at me with suspicion: “You want me to ask her about the caterer as she’s experiencing all these problems in her life?” I nodded yes.
The following day my colleague grinned when we discussed the case. She explained that her client had issues with the caterers, that her husband-to-be had saved the day, and that she wished he’d be as proactive and direct with their children as he was with the hapless caterers.
Never underestimate the power of a weird assessment question like “Chicken or fish?”.
Thicken up the descriptions by which your clients can imagine themselves in a new home. I said to Olivia: “Homes have many lifetimes within them as people age: sure they might be moving in with a newborn, but how could they imagine their daughter’s prom night unfolding in their home? What would they want their children to remember about the house once they drive out of the driveway for the last time and move into a home of their own?”
To speed up we must slow down and build a relational connection with our clients built by genuine curiosity in who they are as people. People come to therapy to be seen. The emotionally-intelligent realtor allows their clients room to express themselves. This data will not only build connection but may be able to allow you to overcome obstacles along the way.
In Transition There is Conflict and Grief
Olivia said she was frustrated with her clients as they entered into new phases of the real estate process. She said, “One client of mine was on the verge of an offer and refused to send in paperwork to the lending agent because she felt like he was rushing her. She said she needed to take some time to rethink whether she really wanted to buy the house.” Olivia never heard from her again.
As irritating as it could be, I asked Olivia to consider how difficult it was for her client to walk away from an old house and into a new house. I asked Olivia about her client: how long had she lived in the home; did her children grow up there; was she fearful about what the move meant for her financially?
Olivia’s client likely wanted more time to process the confusing feelings she was experiencing so she manufactured a speed bump between she and the lending agent. Clients often want to move just as much as they want things to stay the same and they work out that ambiguity in displaced ways.
This stress has a way of activating us at our most defensive. Some fight, some flee, others freeze. In instances like this it is important to empathize with a client by saying, “I know this situation isn’t ideal but you will be able to get through this.” And it doesn’t mean we have to accept their reactions.
Olivia enabled her client’s resistance rather than asking her to be curious about it and question it. When Olivia gave her client permission to take time off from buying a home she allowed her client to avoid the difficult work of exploring the ambiguity she felt.
I instructed Olivia to practice empathy in these instances, but to be directive by saying, “I’m sorry he rushed you into sending the paperwork and doesn’t understand that you already have so much going on in your life, but when we get this paperwork in things will start to slow down and we’ll have a better understanding of where we are in the process and you’ll feel a lot better. I’ll be here for you to strategize about any concerns you have going forward, from whether you’re making the right decision or if this isn’t the house for you. But we need to get this paperwork in.”
Who am I and what triggers me is a great starting place for everyone, even salespeople.
The Self-of-the-Realtor
Therapists are asked to explore the self-of-the-therapist, that is their deep fears, motivations, uncertainties, and proclivities as professionals. Clients activate therapists just as much as therapists activate their clients. While therapists require deep knowledge of therapeutic models and evidence-based approaches, if they struggle with regulating their own emotions it tends to bleed into the therapy room and undermine their clinical work.
We’ve already explored a situation in which Olivia permitted her client to back out of a potential offer because the client felt rushed. But what was it about Olivia that didn’t push back and move the client through the process?
Olivia said, “I didn’t feel like it was my place to tell her what to do. I’ve always been the friend who accepted them for who they were. I couldn’t differentiate that I wasn’t my client’s friend and I was her realtor, that it was my job to make things better between the lending agent and her. Mediating is something I struggle with because my parents always put me in that position before their divorce. I’d rather avoid conflict all together.”
There are very few worksites that don’t involve people interacting with other people. We tend to be triggered by unresolved issues in our past as we navigate the prickly world of one personality bumping into another personality. A know-it-all doctor reminds us of a father who could dole out cold pragmatism but could never provide empathetic warmth. A loving gesture from an intimate partner could feel inauthentic if we’ve never felt deserving of love.
The real estate agent is an intermediary between a large system of personalities, of sellers and buyers, lenders and financial institutions, of husbands and wives with competing and common dreams, and they are all simultaneously activating each other. The emotionally-intelligent realtor must first explore how they’ll be activated by these personalities and then provide pathways for this system to be least anxious.
This means that the emotionally-intelligent realtor must treat the whole system as a client. I instructed Olivia, “As you’re getting to know your clients you ought to be getting to know your mortgage brokers and transaction coordinators. How might their personalities impact your clients? What sort of advice could you deliver to your clients so they might avoid the crotchety lending agent who wants his paperwork yesterday?”
Sales and marketing strategies for realtors to acquire clients are ubiquitous. And while realtors live much of their life on the phones or deep within the throes of networking events, SEO, and picture perfect copywriting sessions, they must exude calmness and authority within the emotional minefield that is buying and selling homes after they’ve attained a client.
In my work with realtors as a coaching consultant I find they most often see results when they start turning inward to the difficulties they had with their clients relationally. What was it about the client that frustrated them? How did they overlook the impact of the process on their client and what ways could they have been both emotional support for and an advocate against their anxiety? Therapists are uniquely qualified to collaborate with realtors as they are experts at not only exploring their client’s reaction to change, but how their clients impact them.
Patrick M. DeCarlo provides executive coaching to realtors and salespeople to convert more closings.
Realtors can close more quickly and more often by adopting techniques that therapists use in their clinical practice. This includes empathizing with ambiguous feelings in the change process, being gently directive, exploring how their emotional well-being can impact their client’s behaviors, and treating the entire real estate system as an anxious entity to be managed.
From her breakup to the impact of her parent’s divorce, Olivia had many issues to explore in therapy and she hadn’t realized how they impacted her career. Realtors will become emotionally-intelligent realtors by scheduling time with a therapist and beginning the work of exploring the self-of-the-realtor and the common issues clients experience in times of change.