How Top Agents Win When the Market Slows Down

Do you ever feel like the market is pushing against you? It’s like being out in the ocean, swimming with your family, and then you glance up and realize the current has carried you a mile down the beach from your towels and your friends. Right now, a lot of agents feel that same pull. You’re fighting and battling just to stay where you were, let alone move forward. It can feel like you’re playing a football game and winning 9 to 6, grinding out field goals for every inch, every yard.

Some agents make their own market. Over the last few months, we’ve had a handful of conversations with agents who were in the business during the ‘08 crash and absolutely crushed it. While everyone else was leaving the business and losing their homes, these agents were getting ahead. They figured out how to create their own market instead of waiting for the market to hand it to them. That mindset is more relevant than ever, because the last three years have seen the fewest real estate transactions since 1995. Even in that environment, the Redux Group was up 56% year over year this year. When you’re up in a market like this, it forces the question: why? What is it that’s actually working?

Winning doesn’t always feel like winning. Even when the numbers are climbing, it doesn’t always feel like you’re doing awesome. It feels rough, like you’re scrapping for every yard. A coach pushed us on this exact point, and the answer kept coming back to one thing: consistency. Not a secret strategy, not a magic lead source, just the willingness to keep going.

Consistency means you show up anyway. Take a small example. My wife loves skee-ball, and she found two arcade-style machines on Facebook Marketplace, the same kind she grew up playing at the beach. So I grabbed a trailer, took the boys, and drove way out to pick them up. We had to crawl home on the highway hauling them and didn’t get to bed until after midnight, which used to be lunchtime for me back in the day. These days I’m up at 5 a.m. every morning, so I woke up hurting and wanting to hit snooze. But one of my life principles is that I show up. I showed up to the gym, I worked out, and even though I wasn’t in my best form, I put in a full day’s worth of work. I made it happen.

Struggling agents stop showing up. When we look at the agents who are struggling, the pattern is almost always the same. They get nervous. They stop seeing the gains in their business, and because it’s not as fun as it was when they were growing, they stop showing up. The moment growth slows, the temptation is to pull back, and that pull is exactly what turns a slow stretch into a real slide.

Master the mundane like the pros. There’s a book sitting right here in the office called Atomic Habits, signed by James Clear. One of the things he points to is a habit found in Olympic athletes: they were willing to master the mundane. They kept going when it got boring. They pushed through the part where most people quit. If you want to master the market, honestly, it comes down to talking to more people. That’s it. Think about how many agents you know who aren’t sharp, who you’d never trust with your biggest transaction, and yet somebody hired them. Why? Because that agent talked to someone at the right time. If you become the person who consistently talks to people, you get to be in that same place, and as Yogi Berra put it, the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Keep fighting, and the tide turns. When you talk to people, success can hit you like a freight train. When you stop, the waves just wash you down the beach. There are stretches when the tide is against you, pulling you down, and stretches when it’s with you and you start to think you’ve become a better swimmer. The reality is the tide is always pushing or pulling. As long as you keep fighting, you stay in it, and staying in it is how you win.

One more thing we’ve found is that people often need to be in it with other people. That’s what helps them break through the glass ceilings they keep running into. So if you’re in that place right now, maybe feeling stuck, maybe feeling like you have so much more to offer than you’ve been able to put out there, let’s have a conversation. Worst case, we talk it through, and you decide to keep doing what you’re doing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a place where we can make a ton of money together and go kick some butt.

If that’s you, book a call with us, email us at ChrisCraddock@ChrisCraddockLeadership.com, or visit chriscraddockleadership.com. Let’s connect and go get it.