The Hour You Spend Looking at Other Agents

You open an app to put something of your own out, and twenty minutes later you have read three other agents' feeds instead. You know what one of them listed this week, roughly what it was priced at, and what their new photographs look like. You have not written anything yourself.

Most agents do some version of this every week. It is not laziness and it is not vanity, because keeping an eye on the market around you is a real part of the work. The question is whether the hour ever turns into a decision, since an hour that ends exactly where it started has cost you twice.

Looking is not research until there is a question attached

There is a difference between reading another agent's marketing and studying it. Reading is open ended, so it finishes when something else interrupts you. Studying begins with a question you wrote down before you opened anything, which means it finishes when that question has an answer.

The question can be very small and still do the job. How long did their last three listings sit before they went under contract? What does the first line of their listing copy usually say? Which parts of their service do they put in front of the public, and which do they never mention at all? Each of those can be answered inside fifteen minutes. None of them can be answered by scrolling.

What you saw and what you learned are not the same thing

Think back to the last agent's work you looked at properly. You can probably describe how it felt. Slicker than yours, busier than yours, better photographed. Those are impressions, and impressions are what scrolling leaves behind. If you cannot say in one plain sentence what that agent does differently from you, then you watched something without learning anything from it.

The same applies in the other direction. If everything you saw simply confirmed that you are doing fine, that is also an impression rather than a finding. Research that only ever agrees with you is not research.

Sorting what you can use from what you cannot

Some of what you observe is genuinely available to you. Some of it belongs to a business with a different size, a different budget and a different market, and copying it would cost you more than it returns. Sorting the two is most of the exercise, and it goes quickly once you are honest about which pile a thing belongs in.

• Things you could do on Monday morning without spending anything.
• Things that would need money or people you do not have yet.
• Things you would not want to do even if you could afford them.

The third pile matters more than agents expect. Knowing what you have chosen not to copy is a sharper form of positioning than knowing what you admire.

The only test that really settles it

Look back at the last three occasions when you studied another agent's business. What did you change afterwards? Not what you noticed, and not what you intended to get round to. What actually changed in how you work, what you say, or where your money goes.

If the honest answer is nothing, that does not mean you should stop looking. It means the looking has not yet been given a job to do, and a habit without a job tends to fill the time that your own marketing was meant to occupy.

A question to sit with this week

The last time you looked closely at another agent in your market, what question were you trying to answer, and would you be able to tell someone else what you found?

If you want to take this further

Working this through with someone else tends to surface the answer faster than working it through alone. You can book a discovery call if you would like to talk it over.