The physical conversation is still where the magic happens.
Never in my 13 years of real estate have I seen this.
Follow-up has always been one of the fundamentals of real estate, or sales in general.
We've all heard the stories. A buyer meets an agent at an open home and never hears from them again. A seller has an appraisal and there's no meaningful follow-up.
Yes, sometimes deals fall in your lap. Particularly between 2020 and 2025, plenty did. But most don't.
It takes resilience to keep trying when buyers or sellers tell you they're not interested. It takes tenacity to come back with a better opportunity the next time you call. And it takes discipline to keep trying to connect the dots when nothing seems to be connecting.
None of that is new to me.
What is new is how rarely buyers answer follow-up calls. And I understand why.
In this market, every agent is following up harder because buyers aren't simply landing in our laps anymore. At the same time, a serious buyer might inspect 10 or 15 properties on a Saturday.
By Monday morning, they could have 15 agents calling, texting and emailing asking the same question: "What did you think?"
I probably wouldn't answer all of them either. And maybe there's a message in that.
If you're one of 15 missed calls and the buyer doesn't call you back, perhaps they're simply telling you they weren't interested enough.
So if agents are becoming more disciplined with follow-up while buyers are becoming more distant in their communication, how do we still connect the dots?
Not the video-call kind. Actual, face-to-face conversation. I think that interaction matters more now than it has for years.
Because increasingly, you may only get one meaningful opportunity to understand someone before they disappear back into the noise.
Calls, texts, emails and DMs still have their place. But they don't seem to carry the substance they once did.
