Most of your clients decided they wanted an agent long before they started looking for one. “I need to sell my home” leads naturally to “I need to find a great agent,” the same way planning a renovation leads to “I need to find the right architect.” People recognize when the stakes are high enough to bring in an expert.
That’s good news for agents. But it also means the real competition is the other agent your client almost called instead of you.
How People Choose When the Stakes Are High
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman spent his career studying how people navigate important decisions. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he showed that when people face complex, high-stakes moments, like selling a home, they rely on trusted signals. They gravitate toward what feels familiar. They put their confidence in the people who’ve already earned their attention.
This is why the script is already written: people sell homes with agents. Your job is to be the agent the script points to.
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Three Things That Decide Which Agent Gets the Call
Once someone decides to sell, a few key patterns shape who they reach out to. These aren’t random. They reflect how people naturally identify who they trust.
The agent who comes to mind gets the call. People choose who’s familiar. The agent whose name they’ve seen, whose reputation they know, and whose content they see or read. That’s who feels like the right call. Staying visible isn’t self-promotion. It’s how you become a familiar name when someone asks, “Who should I call?”
Preparation reads as expertise. When people are making one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives, they look for someone who clearly knows what they’re doing. Your market knowledge, your track record, the way you walk through pricing data at a listing appointment: all of that signals “this person has it handled.” It’s not about bragging. It’s about showing up prepared so your client feels confident from the start.
Protecting value matters more than chasing upside. Your clients want to know their investment is in good hands. Making sure they price correctly, choose the right offer, and navigate the contract smoothly. That reassurance is even more important to them than the possibility of a bidding war. The agent who can show how they protect their clients’ equity tends to stand out over the agent who only talks about best-case outcomes.
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Sign up for a free 7-day trial to use Marketproof Pro and walk into every listing appointment ready to win.
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This Is Where Marketproof Comes In
These patterns explain why people hire agents. Marketproof helps you be the agent they hire.
Before you walk into a listing appointment, Marketproof lets you know the building’s unit-level sales history, price-per-square-foot trends, how long similar units sat on the market, and what sellers in that building actually closed at versus what they listed. You also know the owner: how long they’ve held the unit, what they paid, whether they’ve rented it out, and much more. That’s the kind of preparation that shows in the room.
When you send a homeowner a pricing snapshot specific to their building before they’ve even decided to sell, you’re keeping your name in consideration. And when you can walk them through what similar units in their building have actually traded for, not citywide averages, but their building, their line, their floor, you’re giving them the kind of confidence that earns trust.
Your clients are going to hire an agent. Marketproof helps make sure the agent is you.
Marketproof Pro subscribers get unit-level intelligence for every listing appointment.
Sign up for a free 7-day trial to use Marketproof Pro.
