I’m grateful that I spent a disproportionate amount of time creating CMAs early on. Effective pricing is a skill that I’m really glad to have.

When I was pretty new, I discovered Bold Leads and thought I’d found the holy grail. To be honest, it really didn’t win me that much business, but I was thrilled to be getting in front of sellers in any capacity in my first year. What it did do for me, was it introduced me to the idea of creating CMAs for seller leads which is what got me very engaged in pricing property.¹

I read The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch and it blew my fucking mind. I was aware of the notion of 80/20 from Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Workweek which was the first business book I read when I got back from the Marines. Fast forward like seven years and I’m reading Koch. From that book, I began really considering what the most important thing I did was to generate revenue. It was creating these CMAs and getting them into the hands of seller leads. So I doubled and tripled down on it.

This became my primary focus. I was engineering a script for seller leads based on the book Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort, laser-focusing in on CMAs and my Bold Leads seller leads, and working diligently every day to become the biggest REAL ESTATE AGENT I COULD.²

Because I was doing those CMAs like my ass was on fire and it was the only way to put it out, I learned a lot about pricing homes in my market — particularly in the average home price range.

I’ve never been a guy to look at the market monitor every day. The little thing that shows you what’s sold, what’s new, what’s under agreement, what’s terminated, etc.³ The best of us look at that once per day and know everything. I admire you and them. My business partner is this way. It’s great.

I’ve always thought it was a bit time-consuming, and maybe I’ve paid the price in terms of effectiveness because of that, but I don’t think I’ve missed much. What I do know, is that pulling comps, making adjustments, using a CMA software⁴ that makes the whole process streamlined, and doing lots of market analyses and BPOs have made it such that my pricing has rarely been off.⁵

Some notably successful agents I know will take a listing even if it’s highly overpriced. The logic is to get the price down sufficient to sell the property — even if it takes a while. That’s how I was first brought up.

I believe that this method of listing homes is ineffective. For me, the sellers being pissed off was the thing that made it suck. Something could be said about the ethical quality of the fiduciary who misleads the client into thinking the home is worth more. ⁶ It’s dishonest. If I’m upfront with them about price, they disagree, I go through my whole process and they still want to list high, we either agree to reduce the price after X days if X activity doesn’t occur, or I don’t take the listing.⁷ It’s not worth it to me.

Finding a good CMA software that helps to create not only the analysis but also the ancillary documents that make up a killer presentation packet has been essential for me. Just the other day, my business partner said that he now understands why I do full-on CMAs. Because he did (finally) and his soon-to-be clients were impressed as hell. Little do they know that much of that work is done by a computer.⁸

A lot could be said about making adjustments as well as pricing strategy. I live and work in a market that’s in rural New Hampshire, so I don’t have hundred-unit developments with identical homes throughout. We have to pull comps by knowing which neighborhoods are comparable, which municipalities are comparable, and then what homes are comparable. It’s more complex than what one will typically find in a city and more than in an area with large developments. We have historic homes here that are wildly different. We have acreage to account for. Every market’s different in some ways and similar in others, but it’s just to say that this one takes some attention when comping properties.

In closing, these are the things I did that helped me:

• Finding a good CMA software
• Familiarizing myself with how it worked and optimizing it
• Creating Comparative Market Analyses and Broker Price Opinions for every seller lead I could
• Generating seller leads to create these reports for
• Presenting them⁹

There aren’t many skills I think are more important to a marketer and seller of homes than knowing how to price them.

1. Another post should be written about the importance of learning contracts. Something I, for some reason, didn’t consider exciting enough to warrant spending my time on when I was newer. But I did create CMAs. I didn’t even need you to respond to me. I was making that thing and first-class mailing it to you. ↩︎
2. The grandiosity was debilitating. I can recall sometimes feeling so anxious in my first couple of years that I would literally go to my little 800 SF luxury condo and lay on my pleather couch in the middle of the day to try to nap. This can be a hard business. ↩︎
3. In our MLS, “Hotsheets” are basically the MLS equivalent of a spreadsheet with no photos and I don’t find them to be user-friendly. So, the tool that’s used by many is called Market Monitor. We use Paragon software for MLS. ↩︎
4. Bold Leads introduced me to Cloud CMA back in 2018 and I’ve used it ever since. ↩︎
5. I don’t like to take listings for more money than I know they’re worth. I hate it. ↩︎
6. This was a tactic used to win the listing while competing with other agents. ↩︎
7. I will walk away from a listing opportunity if the seller won’t come to terms about price or if it’s too far. I don’t like to compete for listings if they’re more than like 30 minutes from my home or office. If I know the person, I will list their house and sell the bajesus out of it. But I don’t want to make the trip unless I know I’m the only one gunning for it. ↩︎
8. I don’t mean the selection of comps or the adjustments, but the averages and percentages and ratios and then all the extra documents that support the presentation. I spend more time than I probably should analyzing the comps, and I like to make adjustments to the comps in order to really dial in what I believe the list price should be. ↩︎
9. Mastering the delivery of the presentation came with lots of practice. I took Public Speaking in my time in community college and it helped me a lot with presenting. I don’t look to that and think of the skills I specifically learned, but it popped my cherry a bit more and made it so this thing was just another performance. I have another group that I belong to where I’ve had lots of experience over the years speaking to a room full of people. I recommend it. Toastmasters is something I’ve been recently looking into as well. The CMA is the prop that also guides the presentation and provides cues throughout so you know what to talk about. It’s brilliant really. Use this shit. Most people print comps and wing it every time. Make it a science. ↩︎