Let me tell you what is actually happening out there right now if you are a solo agent trying to lead your clients through a market that does not really make sense.

Your buyers are scared. Not nervous. Not cautious. Scared. Consumer confidence just hit 49.8, which is officially recessionary territory even though we are not technically in a recession. And yet rates are at 6.33 percent. That is the lowest they have been in 14 months. Inventory is up roughly 20 percent year over year. Economists are calling this one of the most balanced markets in nearly a decade.

The data says go. The feeling says wait. And your client is sitting square in the middle of that tension, watching the news, second-guessing themselves, refreshing Zillow at 11 p.m., and waiting for you to make sense of it for them.

Here is the truth most agents are not saying out loud. Your job right now is not to find homes. Your job is to lead five very specific conversations your clients are not getting from anyone else. The agent who can have those five conversations with confidence is the agent who will write business through the rest of this year. The agent who cannot will sit and watch other agents close her deals.

I am Amy Gregory. I sell luxury homes across Arizona’s East Valley — Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, and Queen Creek — and I lead Powerhouse, a community of solo agents inside eXp Realty who are scaling without building teams. Everything below is what I am actually coaching the women in my room on this week. Pull what you need.

Let’s get right into it.

Why are buyers more scared right now than during an actual recession?

Consumer confidence at 49.8 is not normal. The number alone tells you almost everything you need to know about why your buyer keeps “thinking about it” and never moves. They are not waiting on a number on a spreadsheet. They are waiting on their nervous system to calm down.

A 2021 buyer was a frenzy buyer. They saw a house Sunday and wrote an offer Sunday because if they did not, fifteen other people would. Today’s buyer is a deliberation buyer. They pick apart the inspection report. They ask for extensions. They walk if the vibe feels off. They are not behaving badly, they are behaving like scared people behave.

Here is the conversation I want you to have on every buyer consult this month. Sit across from them and say this out loud: “I know you are watching the news. I know you are nervous about your job, about insurance costs, about whether this is the right time. Let me tell you what the actual numbers say, and then you decide what to do with them.” Then walk them through three things and nothing else.

One, rates are the lowest they have been in 14 months. Two, the Housing Affordability Index just jumped 9 points in a single month, which means thousands of buyers who could not qualify last spring qualify right now. Three, on a $450,000 home, the drop from 6.73 to 6.33 percent is about $90 a month. For a lot of buyers, $90 a month was the entire gap between qualifying and not.

You are not selling them. You are giving them permission to act on what is already true.

How do you talk to a seller who thinks rates will keep dropping?

Fannie Mae just released their forecast and the headline is the one your fence-sitting sellers need to hear. They are projecting a 6.3 percent average 30-year rate through the end of 2026 and most of 2027. The meaningful rate drop sellers have been waiting on is not coming this year. It may not come until the middle of next year at the earliest.

That changes the seller conversation entirely. The seller who is waiting for “the right time” is waiting for a window that the most credible forecasters in the country are telling us will not arrive in 2026.

Here is the second thing they need to hear. Active inventory is up roughly 20 percent compared to last year. Every week they wait, the number of homes their buyers are comparing theirs against grows. Their job is not just to sell, it is to be sold before the next wave of sellers lists.

Try this script the next time a seller tells you they are “thinking about waiting.” Say this. “I hear you. Let me tell you what the seller in your same situation is doing six months from now. They are listing the same week ten of their neighbors list. They are negotiating against more inventory, the same buyer pool, and a market that will have already absorbed any rate relief. You can either be the seller buyers compete for in May, or the seller buyers compare against in November. That is the choice.”

That is the whole conversation. You are not pressuring them. You are showing them what waiting actually costs.

If you are reading this and thinking “I have three sellers I need to call this week but I do not know what to say to them” — that is exactly the conversation I help agents script inside my Powerhouse Try-On. Grab 15 minutes with me and let’s walk through it together.

What does pre-market inventory actually mean for your buyers and why does it matter now?

The other thing happening this month that most buyers do not know about is the pre-market inventory war. Redfin just launched Early Access. Compass has their exclusive network. Zillow is in a full-on battle with the MLSs over who gets to control private inventory first. It is a mess behind the scenes, and the regular buyer who is shopping alone on Zillow is the one paying the price.

Here is what that means for you and your business. The buyer who hires you and the buyer who searches alone are now playing two completely different games. The buyer who hires you has access to pre-market and off-market inventory through your MLS feeds, your private networks, and your relationships with listing agents in your target neighborhoods. The buyer who searches alone is seeing a fraction of what is actually available, and is showing up to public listings that already have multiple offers from buyers who saw the home days earlier through channels she never knew existed.

That is a real value proposition. And most agents are completely failing to communicate it.

Add this to every buyer presentation you do from now on. A slide, a paragraph, a single sentence, I do not care. But your buyer needs to hear out loud: “Here is what you see on Zillow. Here is what I see. Here is the gap between those two pictures of the market, and here is why working with me is going to put a home in your hand before another buyer ever sees it.” If your buyer presentation does not include that conversation right now, you are leaving deals on the table. (My listing and buyer presentation kit is what I use to walk agents through this exact buildout, if you want a shortcut.)

Why does the week before closing make or break the client relationship?

The week before closing is the most stressful seven days of the entire transaction, and it is also the week most agents disappear. Texts go unanswered, the closing disclosure shows up and nobody walks the client through it, the walk-through gets skipped — and the agent wonders six months later why the referral never came.

Your job in that week is not to write more contracts. It is to be present in a way that nobody else is being present for that client. Here is the cadence I run for every transaction.

Day one of the final week, reach out to the title company directly and confirm the closing disclosure is on track to land three business days before close. Day two, schedule the final walk-through and make sure they actually do it. Day three, call the lender — an actual phone call to confirm clear to close, funds staged, no conditions sitting open. Day four, sit down with your client and walk through the closing disclosure line by line. Closing day, show up to the actual closing. Every time. Not just to write the offer and disappear.

Five touchpoints in seven days. None of them are above and beyond. All of them are the job. But almost nobody does it, and the agents who do are the ones who get every referral from that client for the next ten years.

What’s the difference between an agent who waits for the market and an agent who leads it?

Here is what is going to happen over the next 12 months. Two kinds of agents come out of this year looking very different by next.

The first kind waits. She watches the news, internalizes the buyer fear, gets quiet on her stories, stops calling her past clients, and tells herself it is just a slow season. She closes 6 transactions this year and almost quits twice.

The second kind leads. She has the rate conversation, the seller conversation, the pre-market conversation, and the closing conversation down cold. She is on stories three days a week explaining what the Fannie Mae forecast means in plain English. She closes 24 transactions, launches her first digital product, and comes out of this year with a business that did not exist last January.

The difference between those two agents is not skill. It is not market. It is not luck. It is whether she had access to a room where Powerhouse to be. (And if you are inside one of those big-name brokerages wondering if the brokerage on your sign is actually serving you, my free How to Hire a Broker guide on that page is 20 questions every agent should ask before she signs another year of her business away.)

FAQ

Should I be encouraging my buyers to buy right now or wait until rates drop?

Encourage them to decide based on their financial reality, not the news. Rates at 6.33 percent are the lowest in 14 months and Fannie Mae is forecasting 6.3 percent through most of 2027. If your buyer can afford the home today, “waiting for rates” has a real cost — every month they rent, their landlord’s equity grows instead of theirs. They can refinance when rates drop. They cannot buy at today’s prices retroactively.

How do I price a listing in a market where buyers are scared but the data is good?

Price where it wins immediately, not where you hope it lands. An overpriced home in front of a scared buyer is an invisible home. Pre-inspect when you can, share the report in the listing, and offer concessions like rate buydowns or closing cost credits upfront.

What do I say to a seller who is convinced rates are going to drop?

Show them the Fannie Mae forecast. Then show them the inventory growth. Then tell them what their listing competes against in November versus what it competes against in May. The conversation is not about pressuring. It is about showing the real cost of waiting in real numbers.

How do I explain pre-market inventory to a buyer who has been shopping alone on Zillow?

Tell them Zillow is showing them a fraction of what is actually available, that Redfin and Compass and private MLS networks are pushing inventory through channels they do not have access to, and that their fix is not a better app — it is an agent with access to those networks. Then offer them a private home search link from your MLS portal.

What if my brokerage is not giving me the support to have these conversations?

That is a real conversation to have with yourself this year. If you are inside a brokerage that wants you stuck in transactions and not building a real business, you are paying a tax for that and you may not know it. My free How to Hire a Broker guide is 20 questions that will surface exactly where your brokerage is and is not serving you.

What’s next?

If you read this and thought “this is the year I figure out the agent I actually want to be” — that is exactly the conversation I have with women in Powerhouse every week. We meet every Tuesday. We anchor in transactions. And we build the business around transactions that creates the lifestyle you got into real estate for in the first place.

Let’s hop on a 15-minute Powerhouse Try-On call and see if we are a fit.

👉 Book a 15-min Powerhouse Try-On call with me →

Pinky promise, I won’t tell your broker. ⚡