How to Stop Losing Deals to Cancellations in 2026

By Chris Craddock

Chris Craddock is a seasoned Realtor, real estate investor, and entrepreneur with over two decades of industry expertise since 2001.

If you’ve been in real estate for any length of time, you already know 2025 was a rough year for deal retention. More deals fell apart last year than any year in the last decade, and if the early signs from 2026 are any indication, it’s not slowing down.

Here’s what most agents are missing, though. They blame the market. The market isn’t the problem. Most deals don’t fall apart because of the market. They fall apart because we did not communicate well throughout the process.

That’s the single biggest shift our team has made over the past year, and it’s the reason listing agents have been choosing our buyers over others. They know our reputation. They know our deals actually close. And they know we’ve figured out how to help buyers and sellers manage their expectations in a way that keeps everything moving forward.

If you want to build the same reputation, here are the communication shifts that matter most.

1. Get ahead of buyer’s remorse.

Almost every buyer gets cold feet at some point early in the process. It’s called buyer’s remorse, and it hits almost 90% of the buyers we work with. The problem isn’t the feeling. The problem is that buyers don’t know it’s normal. They hit that wave of doubt, read it as their gut telling them something’s wrong, and suddenly a deal that checked every box starts falling apart.

The fix is to name it upfront. When a buyer goes under contract, we congratulate them and tell them what’s coming: “We want to let you know that something happens with most buyers. There’s even a phrase for it. It’s called buyer’s remorse, and it affects almost 90% of the people we work with. It may not happen to you, but if it does, it’s completely normal.”

Once a buyer knows to expect that feeling, they stop treating it as a signal. They start treating it as a stage they’re passing through. That alone saves deals.

2. Pre-address seller regret the same way.

Sellers do their own version of this. They accept an offer, then start second-guessing it. “I accepted too early. I should have waited. If I’d stayed on the market another 60 days, I could have gotten more.” Left unchecked, that regret shows up at the worst possible time, usually at home inspections, when the seller tries to renegotiate to “fix” the deal they feel bad about.

Our approach is to walk sellers through the reasoning behind their offer at the moment they accept it. Not after. Not when the doubt creeps in. Right then. When the reasoning is clear upfront, they stop working against their own deal later.

3. Vet the lender, home inspector, and title professionals.

When a buyer comes in with their own lender, we don’t automatically defer. We push them to at least have a conversation with a lender we trust. You often get what you pay for, and the cheapest lender isn’t usually the one who gets the deal to closing.

Same principle applies to home inspectors and title professionals. Keep your circle of trust tight and push clients toward professionals who know how to handle problems without creating new ones. Vetted professionals keep deals together that would otherwise fall apart.

4. Set home inspection expectations before the report arrives.

A buyer who expects a 10-page home inspection report and gets a 50-page report is going to panic, even if nothing in the report is actually scary. The length alone feels like a red flag.

So we set the expectation upfront: “The inspector’s job is to document absolutely everything. The report could easily come back at 50 pages or more. That’s normal. What matters is what we flag for the seller. We’ll review it together and decide what’s actually worth asking for.”

That one conversation prevents more deal-breaking moments than almost any other script we use.

The overarching rule: stay in communication the whole way through.

Every strategy above comes back to the same principle. Most deals don’t fall apart because of the market or because of some problem nobody saw coming. They fall apart because somewhere along the way, the agent stopped communicating and the client started filling in the gaps themselves, usually with worst-case thinking.

Our team has built this into a system, and it’s the reason our deal retention rate is where it is. If you’re tired of watching good deals unravel at the worst moments, and you want to talk through how we handle this across The Redux Group, Kat Geralis Home Team, and Homejourney Team, reach out.

Book a Call to get started, or email ChrisCraddock@ChrisCraddockLeadership.com with any questions.

Till next time, go get it.