A friend forwarded me a postcard last week. It was from a real estate brokerage in Austin, addressed to him by name, and it began: "I have a buyer for your house." He does not have a house for sale. He has lived in his Tarrytown bungalow for thirty-one years. He found the postcard, in his words, "vaguely insulting."
I think about this kind of thing often. The default mode of the modern real estate practice — the door-knock, the cold-call, the algorithmically-targeted postcard — is built on a particular theory of how people decide to sell their home. That theory is that they need to be prompted. Activated. Pushed.
Our theory is the opposite.
In our experience — twenty years of it, three thousand or so transactions across two generations of the practice — families know when it is time to sell. They are not waiting for a postcard. They are waiting for an advisor whose judgment they trust, who has done this work for people they know, and who they can call when the moment is right.
The cold-call practice is also, I think, an honesty problem. You cannot, in good faith, tell a stranger you have a buyer for their house when you do not. You can tell them you have a roster of buyers in their general price range, which most agents do. But that is not what the postcard says.
“Families know when it is time to sell. They are waiting for an advisor whose judgment they trust.”
What we do instead.
We do not knock on doors. We do not buy lists. We do not call you because the algorithm flagged you as likely-to-move. The vast majority of our work — somewhere north of 90% — comes from people we have already represented, and from the friends, families, and neighbors they recommend us to.
It is a slower way to build a practice. It is also, twenty years in, a more durable one.
If we are the right practice for you, you will know. And we will be here when you are ready to talk.
