Today’s track: Don’t Let It Bring You Down — Neil Young
Yesterday my client got a phone call about a deal that's closing this week.
The gist of it: your agent isn't responding. Not to calls. Not to texts. Not to emails. Gone dark, apparently.
So my client hung up believing I'd left them hanging on the biggest transaction of their year.
If you know me at all, you know exactly how that landed.
It traced back to the agent on the other side of the deal — a guy near the end of a long career. He's told me he's been in the business twenty-three years — he's told me that at least three or four times, and I mean that with real affection, because twenty-three years is twenty-three years and that is not nothing. But things have moved slowly on this file. Questions asked twice. Days where nothing came back.
And now the guy who won't respond is me.
Here's what I didn't do.
I didn't call and defend myself. I didn't write the paragraph. I didn't get emotional about it, because four hundred and fifty-plus closings in thirteen years teaches you one thing above almost everything else:
The emotion has never once moved the file.
What moves the file is information. So I picked up my phone and said it out loud, like I was talking to a person:
Go through my email, my texts, and my call log. This name, this address. When did I last reach out? When did they last reach me? And check my spam folder — is anything of theirs landing somewhere I'm not looking?
Ninety seconds.
Every call. Every text. Every email. Timestamped, in order, all the way back to the beginning of the deal.
Zero missed. Not one.
I took the screenshots and sent them straight to my client. Not as a gotcha, and not to make anybody look bad — just so the person who actually had something at stake was looking at the real record instead of a rumor.
Yesterday I wrote about how I've become the guy who does every chore the second it shows up, and how it isn't discipline — it's me setting up Future Rob for a day when I might not feel this good.
I did not expect the business version of that to come back around inside twenty-four hours.
But that's what happened. Past Rob answered every one of those calls. Past Rob sent the follow-up text after the missed one. Past Rob didn't leave a single thread hanging. And Present Rob got to stay calm and answer in ninety seconds, because none of it depended on my memory.
That's the actual return on the habit. Not efficiency.
Calm.
Here's the system, because the system is the point.
Rule one: touch it twice. If I call and don't get you, you get a text or an email. Always. One channel is a hope. Two channels is a record.
It costs nine extra seconds. It has saved me more times than I can count. And it is the single easiest thing in this entire newsletter to start doing this afternoon.
Rule two: sweep the spam folder. Every single day. Something scans it for anything that looks like it belongs to a live file — a processor I don't have saved, an agent's brand-new brokerage domain, a number I've never seen.
And it isn't just deals in progress. It's catching buyer and listing inquiries, which is the part I'd have never thought to build on my own. I work with a lot of out-of-state and international clients, and their emails and their phone numbers look exactly like spam to a filter that's never met them. Foreign number, unfamiliar domain, straight into the folder nobody opens.
Those are real people trying to buy or sell a house. They don't get lost anymore. Nothing falls through the cracks.
That rule matters more to me than the first one, and I want to be honest about why.
The version of this story where I'm the problem is a real version. It happens. Somebody switches email domains mid-deal, or their assistant writes in from an address I've never seen, and it lands in a folder I'd never think to open. I've had it happen. Everybody has.
So before I go looking for proof that I'm right, I go looking for proof that I'm wrong.
That's the whole discipline, right there. "I never got it" is a crack, and I'm trying to run a business where nothing falls through one.
Rule three: don't carry it in your head. I have ADD. That's not a confession, it's an operating manual — if I set a thing down, it's gone. So none of it lives up there. Email, texts, calls, calendar. I can ask for any of it in plain English and have it in front of me before the other person finishes their sentence.
Yesterday, in the middle of all this, I was driving and needed a document in somebody's hands, and I wasn't going to be near a desk for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is a long time when somebody's waiting on you. So I said it out loud — forward this email to this person so they've got what they need — got home, checked, and it was sent.
Strike when the iron's hot. Speed is a service. Some days it's the entire service.
Rule four: one thread, everybody on it. This is the one I actually did about it, and it's the only part of this story that fixes anything.
I didn't send a complaint. I sent an email. Title, the other agent, his broker, my client, me — everybody on one thread, one subject line, and a note that said let's keep it all right here so nobody's guessing.
That's the real answer to a hard file. Not being right. Being impossible to be wrong about. When everything lives on one thread, "nobody told me" stops being available to anyone — and that includes me.
And then, because this is the business: I still got two separate one-off emails off the thread, and had to rope everybody back in again.
That's fine. That's the job. You build the system, then you maintain the system, and maintaining it is most of the work. It's frustrating some days. It's also just Tuesday.
And now the part where I tell on myself, because speed without boundaries is just being available, and being available is not a business model.
I don't take midnight calls. That is not a world I live in.
Thirteen years ago, brand new, advertising on Craigslist — and Craigslist in 2013 was a cast of characters. Two in the morning. Four in the morning. People calling about a rental like it was a 24-hour diner. So I set my phone to stop ringing at nine at night and start again at nine in the morning. Not silenced-and-anxious. Off.
I work with West Coast clients and international clients, so the eleven o'clock and midnight calls still come. They just don't wake me up.
To be clear, I'm not gone. I still glance at texts outside that window — I'm monitoring, I'm just not on call. There's a difference, and the difference is who's deciding: me or the phone.
The rest of it is boring on purpose. Bed by ten, ten-thirty. Up at five or six. Forty-minute nap in the afternoon, most days, and I'd defend that nap in court. Those calls that came in at midnight get answered in the morning by somebody who slept — which is a better answer than the one they'd have gotten at midnight.
I wrote a while back about how the box turned out to be the thing that set me free. Same principle. Nine-to-nine isn't a wall between me and my clients. It's the reason I can be all the way on from nine to nine.
Systems. Boundaries. Standards. Then work with people who can move inside them.
Now — the older agent. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about a guy who's slow, and it isn't one.
I feel for agents aging out of this business. It moved fast on them. The tools changed, the pace changed, the expectations changed. If you built a great career on a car phone, a lockbox, and a good handshake, nobody handed you a manual for the rest of it. That's a real loss and it is not a character flaw.
But I don't think age is the variable. I really don't.
I know agents with decades on me who are running AI in their business right now and are more streamlined, more organized, and flat-out faster than some of the sharpest young people I know. They're not coding. They're not "in tech." They started talking to it like a colleague — what did I miss, who haven't I called back, what's sitting in spam, draft this, send this, remind me Thursday — and they folded it into the regular day until it stopped being a tool and became the way they work.
That's the whole barrier. Familiarity. That's it.
And once you're past it, something shifts that I didn't see coming. Every problem starts looking solvable. Not in a motivational-poster way — in a very literal, mechanical way. That's annoying and it eats forty minutes becomes that's a thing I can hand off. And then you just start attacking. Attack, attack, attack. Until the stuff that used to eat your Tuesday is a nine-second habit you don't think about anymore.
If you're twenty-three years in and quietly wondering whether the train left — it didn't. Hit reply. I'll show you exactly how mine is set up. No pitch, no recruiting speech. I'll just show you.
Here's why any of this matters to me.
Not to win a disagreement with another agent. That deal closes this week, and I hope he has a great rest of his career. Neil Young's got today's instruction and I'm taking it: don't let it bring you down.
It matters because of what my client felt for about ten minutes yesterday. They hung up a phone call thinking the person handling the biggest transaction of their year had gone quiet on everybody. Then, ninety seconds later, they had the receipts. Every touch. Every timestamp. Nothing missed.
That's not a flex. That's comfort. That's a client who gets to go back to their life and stop wondering whether somebody's watching the thing they can't watch themselves.
I've been called the realtor's realtor, and it's still my favorite title, and this is what it actually cashes out to. Not slick. Not aggressive. Just: nothing falls through, the receipts exist, I'm your advocate in all the ways, and I've seen this movie four hundred and fifty times — so you don't have to get emotional about it either.
Stick to the objective. What's the goal? Get everybody to the table.
Everything else is noise, and the noise has never moved a file.
📊 Yesterday's poll — Is your life set up for Future You? Getting there: 58.8%. Honestly never thought about it: 17.6%. Everything's ready: 11.8%. Future me is on their own: 11.8%.
“Getting there” took it with 58.8%, but the number I keep looking at is the 17.6% who said they'd honestly never thought about it. No shame in that — I'd have picked it for about eleven of my thirteen years. And under twelve percent of you said everything's ready. I'd like to meet those people.
How long should it take an agent to get back to you?
Be less stiff, be more malleable to go with the flow!
With Enthusiasm,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: The Future is Coming. Ninety-six seconds.
PSS: I found myself saying the Kurt Vonnegut quote a bunch yesterday “If this isn’t good, I don’t know what is.” Did anyone else grow up reading Vonnegut?
PSSS: Jason Lewris put out a number this morning: 41% of every home for sale in America is sitting on a price cut. San Antonio's at 54%. Austin 54%. Dallas 53%. Rochester, New York — 15.85%.
He didn't list us, so I pulled it myself. Jefferson County: 877 of 2,154 active listings have taken a reduction. That's 40.7%. Whole MLS footprint, 42.4%.
We are the national average, almost to the decimal. Not the market that's cracking. Not the one that's frozen. Dead middle — which in a year like this one is a fine place to stand.
Also: 3,992 active this morning. Friday it was 4,021. That's the first time in a minute that number went the other way. Let’s move some product! Hit me up!