When you're going up against a top listing agent in your territory in attempting to procure a listing, you can sometimes really have your work cut out for you. It's easy for people to want to hire and work with a winner, and when an agent shows owners all the listings they currently have and all the properties they've successfully moved in your territory in the past, it can build a lot of credibility in the owners' minds about this agent.

But there may be another story that's not being told to the owners about agents like these.

While some agents may always have a great number of listings and move a lot of property in the area, how often do their listings expire without them having successfully sold or leased the properties? If this happens a reasonably high percentage of the time, this may be something you can utilize to enroll owners in listing their properties with you instead of your competition.

Depending on how your MLS or property database works, you may simply be able to do a search under the agents who are your competitors to find out all the listings they've taken from owners that actually expired before the property was ever sold or leased. If I were an owner being wooed by an agent showing me all their current listings in the territory, and all the properties that they had sold and leased over the years, someone else pointing out to me all the listings that the agent had failed to move also throughout the past year would certainly get my attention, too! It would have me thinking that I could end up as just another "expired" statistic in their listing inventory. And no owner wants to experience this.

The reason I bring this up is because in my 20 years as a full-time agent in our industry, I observed quite a number of agents who were brilliant at getting listings but horrible at providing great service and follow-up to their clients after they obtained these listings.

Becoming "listing machines" was what they were excellent at, and I considered myself fortunate that I was not an owner who had listed my property with them. One of these agents even said to me one day, "Jim, have you ever driven down a street, seen one of our company's signs and said to yourself, 'Wow, I didn't even know our office had a listing on this street?' Then as you get closer to the sign you see that your name is on it?"

Well, that wasn't the type of agent that I was, and I'm guessing that it's also not the type of agent that you want to be either.

While some owners may be wooed and impressed by agents who have a lot of listings in your area, they may also not understand that the agents who have the most listings often simultaneously have the least available time to service each and every one of these listings.

You on the other hand, while eloquently pointing these aspects out to your owners, now have an opportunity to position yourself as the best choice your owners can make in hiring a real estate agent who will provide them with the wonderful, outstanding service that they're truly looking for.

Published: May 19, 2004

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.