Have you ever given up on a listing? Giving up is where at some point you mentally just throw in the towel. You say to yourself: To heck with this, if it sells -- it sells, if it doesn't -- it doesn't! You then just put the listing in your advertising rotation and walk away. Maybe the listing crosses back through your mind every couple of weeks, but other than that it's gone.

Many agents, even so called "top producers" use the old spaghetti theory, which is -- if I just throw enough spaghetti against the wall something will stick. Most agents are trained from day one in their career to expect that roughly half the time when they take a listing it will fail to sell.

Solution? Take more listings! This will even out your odds and guarantee you some level of success, albeit at the cost of some equal level of failure. This cost of failure is not just for you by the way, it's also a failure for the clients who employed you to sell their home. Based on the national averages it appears that many agents have this kind of attitude.

But does this have to be true? What if we reversed this old paradigm, what if we started from the beginning and said that in our new business model we expect that every listing will sell. In fact, anything less than a 100 percent sale rate would create an event that we would study and learn from in order to avoid repeating the same mistake in the future.

Is this high-minded? Yes! But think of the possibilities! What would you have to change in order to achieve this goal? Obviously you would need to qualify sellers more thoroughly, which may mean you would reject some sellers, because of this you may have to prospect more often, and more effectively; you would also need to educate the seller on the sales process, expectations, and the team effort needed to sell the listing successfully.

In addition you would need to monitor every aspect of the listing -- condition, pricing, and marketing on a weekly basis to ensure the home is always in a position to attract the maximum number of buyers.

When we begin to open our minds to the possibilities of a 100 percent sales rate, we almost instantly find the holes in our current thought process. When we accept, even welcome a failure rate in our business it almost always invites laziness to our business systems. What if the restaurant you frequented thought it was acceptable to only cook half the meals properly? What if the hotel you stayed at thought it was OK to only clean half the rooms? What if the mechanic who works on your car only fixed half the problem? Unacceptable?

Of course! Let's raise our standards and reset our thinking process! What if you achieved an 80 percent sales rate during the next 90 days? Would that change your bottom line? For most agents this would create an instant 20 percent raise in income without taking a single extra listing!

Published: May 31, 2005

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Jim Remley is a speaker, author, and consultant. He is also an active real estate broker in Southern Oregon where he owns a network of six offices. Jim won the Rookie Instructor of the Year award in 2001 from Realty-U, the largest network of real estate educators in the nation. He was the winner of the 2002 Pacesetter Award, and nominated for the Real Estate Instructor of the Year Award during the first quarter of 2003. To learn more about Jim, please visit ProPerformer.com or e-mail him at .