Selling Real Estate in the Age of Distrust: Regain Your Confidence

Welcome to the most distrustful real estate market since 2009…are we all having a bitchin time?

Nobody is buying and rates won’t be budging anytime this year.

Sellers have diluted ideas about getting Covid-like crazed values that have them white-knuckling as their listings grow more stale by the day. 

Brokers are treating agents like they’re nothing more than a number.

Inflation is through the roof and trust in real estate agents is at an all-time low.

Oh, and let’s not forget the idea of “The American Dream” is dead now that homeownership is widely considered impossible or undesirable. 

Meanwhile, social media platforms are making it increasingly impossible to get your content found or seen by your existing followers and AI has turned organic reach and SEO completely upside down. 

So how the hell are you supposed to make money as a real estate agent without resorting to Door Dashing? 

Reshape Your Real Estate Business Plan For A Frozen Market

If you are anything like most real estate agents you don’t have an actual business plan or formal business model outside of “sell as many properties as possible”.

However, you’re here reading The Elevated Agent so that tells me you’re interested in being a whole lot more than anything like the average agent.

The first reality you need to accept is that the market will likely remain frozen for the foreseeable future but you need to generate cash flow regardless. So if you can’t make the majority of your income through commissions on your transactions, what can you monetize? Better yet, what should you monetize to avoid becoming another statistic or taking out a loan to cover operating expenses? 

Your personal brand, daily steps, and the supplemental services that prove your worth to your clients. 

Creating A Personal Brand That Resonates With A Niche That Has Urgent & Important Problems

Relying on the branding your broker provides you is an excellent to sound like every other real estate agent. 

Creating a personal brand around who you are, who you serve, and how you do that differently than anyone else outside of real estate?

That makes you rare and relatable.

The trick is to choose the right real estate niche based around your real life experiences and behavioral psychology rather than the usual random methods most agents use. 

Let’s say you’re a female agent and you decided to get your license after becoming burned out in your corporate job. You could build a bullet-proof personal brand around helping other women in corporate strike that balance, develop the right boundaries, nurture their nervous systems to prevent burnout etc. From there, you could go on to get certified in things that would matter to this audience like nervous system regulation and burnout recovery. That also opens the door for you to have courses, digital products or even entire membership sites designed to empower women in corporate get the respect and resets they deserve.

You don’t have to shove your real estate license down their throats, you can just weave your story in naturally and your pipeline will start surprising you. 

The reason it feels impossible to create a unique and meaningful message when marketing to a zip code? It is because those people don’t share common goals, pain points or buyer psychology. That is why I say a zip code isn’t a real estate niche!

By building a personal brand around who you are as a human being and what you have been through and how you are leveraging that to make the lives of those around you, it opens the door for you to sell more than just houses without making it seem like you’re all over the place. It allows you to meet your audience where they are in reality and serve them in a more meaningful way. 

Document Your Daily Steps & Productize Them

As Gary Vaynerchuk will remind you, some of the best content comes from documenting what you’re already doing versus trying to create it from scratch.

Let’s continue with the same example niche of busy women in corporate that struggle with burnout and imagine how that niche would change your daily steps in a way you could document them with the intention of monetizing them.

The best way to do this is to use a planner to document what you do every day and reflect on how those tasks have impacted you and your business. In fact, some of your most successful content will probably come from sharing the wins and losses from your daily activities.

From there, you’ll start to see patterns emerge: the scripts that worked, the systems that saved you time, the mindset shifts that got results. Those patterns? That’s product gold. You can turn them into:

• Digital downloads (think burnout recovery planners or “boundaries at work” templates)

• Mini-courses or workshops

• Email nurture sequences for your niche

• Swipe files, scripts, or service bundles that help people move through hard seasons just like you did

When you document with intention, you're not just creating content, you're creating assets. And those assets can sell while you sleep, speak for your value when your commission pipeline slows, and give people a reason to stick around long after their interest in Zillow fades.

Sell Supplemental Services That Work Best In A Rough Real Estate Market

Finally, I want to encourage you to think both inside and outside of the real estate box when it comes to your services as a real estate agent. I think most agents stop at the standard residential real estate model when they need to zoom out and consider the bigger picture of what people really need in various economies and moments of their lifecycle as a buyer or seller. 

What does that look like?

Assuming still that you’re that female agent focused on burned out women in corporate. These are women that are busy but also worried about their bottom lines and wishing for someone willing to advocate for them. 

A strategic service you could offer would be to help them through the entire process of disputing their property taxes to get their bill, and ultimately their mortgage reduced. This is a proven business model I helped agents implement back in the very beginning of the pandemic when the market was in a temporary freeze and people were desperate for relief from housing costs. 

This shows your clients that you care about their financial interests while allowing you to develop your pipeline and generate much-needed cash flow for your business. 

The Takeaway: Agents Who Adapt Will Lead This Market

If this market has shown us anything, it’s that the old playbook doesn’t cut it anymore and that’s good news if you’re the kind of agent who’s willing to think differently.

You don’t need to go viral. You don’t need to work 24/7.You just need to build a brand that actually means something to the people you want to help.

So if you’ve been looking for a sign to evolve, diversify, and finally give yourself permission to show up as the whole damn human you are, this is it. Because in the age of distrust, the agents who win will be the ones who are relatable, relevant, and relentlessly resourceful.