What a Competitor's Sold Listings Tell You That Their Feed Does Not

Ask most agents who their main competition is and they will name two or three people straight away. Ask them how many listings those people took last year, how long the listings sat, and how many came off the market without selling, and the answers get much vaguer.

That is a strange gap, because the second set of questions is the one you can actually answer. A competitor's social media is what they chose to show you. Their transaction record is what happened, and in most markets you already have access to it through your own board.

The feed is a brochure, the record is a result

Everything an agent publishes has been selected. The listing that sold in four days gets a post. The one that sat for five months, took two price reductions and expired does not. Neither does the listing that was withdrawn and quietly relisted under a fresh number so the clock started again.

None of that is dishonest. You do the same thing, and so does every business that markets itself. It simply means that judging a competitor by their marketing tells you about their marketing and almost nothing about their business.

What is actually sitting there to be read

What your board publishes will vary, so start with whatever you can see rather than what you wish you could see. In most cases that includes the number of listings taken, the number sold, the time between listing and sale, the difference between the first asking price and the final sale price, and the listings that came off the market without a buyer.

Run that on yourself first. Pull your own last twelve months before you pull anybody else's, because the exercise is worth very little until you know your own figures well enough to be surprised by someone else's.

What the numbers tend to expose

An agent who takes a great many listings and sells a modest proportion of them is running a different business from an agent who takes fewer and sells nearly all of them. Both can look identical online. One is winning on volume of appointments, the other on pricing conversations and preparation, and those two businesses need completely different things from you if you intend to compete with either.

The gap between asking price and sale price is worth reading slowly. A consistently narrow gap usually means the pricing conversation is happening properly at the listing appointment rather than six weeks later. That is a skill, not a marketing budget, which makes it something you can close the distance on without spending anything.

The point is not to copy anybody

The purpose of looking is not to find a better agent and imitate them. It is to find the one thing they do measurably better than you, and then to decide, deliberately, whether that is the thing you want to be known for or whether your advantage lies somewhere else entirely.

Plenty of agents discover that the competitor they feared is beating them on something they do not actually want, and that they are already ahead on the thing their own clients care about. That is a useful afternoon, and it is far more settling than guessing.

A question to sit with this week

If you put your own twelve month record beside the record of the agent you consider your closest competition, which of the two of you would a seller choose on the numbers alone, and what would they be choosing you for?

If you want to take this further

Reading your own numbers honestly is easier with another person in the room. You can book a discovery call if you would like to go through yours.