Most deals don’t die from a no
There is a particular kind of quiet that ends more deals in this business than rejection ever has.
You spoke to an owner. It went well. You sent a follow up and heard nothing. You sent another. Still nothing. And somewhere around the fourth or fifth attempt, without ever actually deciding to, you stopped.
Nobody told you no. That is the part worth sitting with.
What Silence Actually Means
Silence is not a decision. It is the absence of one.
The owner did not weigh you up against the other agents and choose somebody else. In most cases they read your message on the way into a meeting, thought they would reply later, and then did not. That is the whole story. There is no verdict in it.
But we do something with that silence. We turn it into an answer, because an answer is easier to live with than not knowing. He is not interested. She has gone with someone else. They would have replied if they wanted to.
None of that is information. It is just a story that lets you stop, and stopping is what it was for.
The Number Almost Nobody Reaches
Most agents stop at two attempts. Most deals close after five.
Read those two sentences again, because the entire economics of your year sits between them. Your money lives at attempts four, five and six, and almost nobody in your office is still there.
That is not a motivational point. It is a competitive one. The reason attempt six works is precisely that everybody else has gone home by then. You are not fighting four agents for that owner’s attention at that stage. You are the only one still in the conversation.
Why Just Checking In Guarantees Silence
Here is the part most agents get wrong, and I did it for years myself.
Persistence is not sending the same message again. That is repetition wearing better clothes.
Just checking in is not follow up. It is a reminder that you want something and have not brought anything. Put yourself the other side of it. Your phone goes, it is an agent, just checking in. There is nothing there to reply to, so you do not reply, and now both of you are stuck.
Every message has to give them something they did not already know. That is the whole rule.
What Goes In Messages Three, Four and Five
You are not short of material. You are sitting on more information about that building than the owner has, and almost none of it has been passed on.
Use these.
- What sold in their building recently, and what it actually achieved rather than what it was asking
- How long it sat before it moved
- A comparable that has just launched, and what it says about their price
- What buyers said at the last viewing in that tower, in their words
- A change in the building itself. Service charge, handover, a new development next door
Five of those and you have earned a sixth message. Five just checking ins and you have earned a block.
The Cadence
Timing matters as much as content, and most agents are either far too eager for a week and then absent forever, or vague from the start.
Day zero, call, then a message, then a call again later that day. Then day one. Day three. Day five. Day seven. Day ten. Day fourteen.
Then a decision message. Not a chase. Something that lets them close the loop honestly, which usually gets a reply from people who have been silent for a fortnight, because you have finally made it easy to say something other than yes.
Day five is the one everybody skips. It is also the one where you stop being another agent and start being the agent who is still there.
The Agent Who Sent A Sixth
Two agents I know were both working the same kind of owner. Both were ignored five times.
The first sent five messages, got nothing back, decided the owner was not interested and moved on. That is reasonable. Most people would call it reading the room.
The second sent the same five and got the same silence. He told me it felt like talking to himself. But every message gave the owner something they did not already know.
Then he sent a sixth.
The reply came back the same day. Two units for sale, twelve million and seventeen. You can list them.
Twenty nine million in stock, one message after the point where the first agent stopped. They were not different in ability. They were different by one message.
They did not say no. They said nothing. Those are two different things.
One Page, Two Minutes
None of this survives contact with a busy week unless it is written down, which is why the agents who follow up properly are almost always the ones tracking it.
The scorecard I use is a single page. Four numbers, filled in at the end of the day, two minutes. It turns I think I followed up well this week into something you can actually look at.
If your months keep swinging and you want a second opinion on why, book a free 30 minute call and we will go through your numbers together.
Want a second opinion on your numbers?
Book a free 30 minute call with Ashley. No pitch, just the numbers and what to do next.
Or start here: Winning Listings, the listings course.
Ashley J Hawthorne is the founder of Your Real Estate COO and Managing Director of a Dubai brokerage, with 23 years in real estate across the UK and Dubai and nine industry awards. More about Ashley.
