So why do people use objections? Why can’t they just be upfront and just tell us what they are thinking? (lol) This is about as mysterious as asking your significant other “What do you want for dinner?”. No one knows, but from my experience, I have a few ideas why I think sellers are giving real estate agents objections.
- The agent does not know their scripts and they have not practiced them at all. So the phone conversation had no purpose and had no point. They got so off track during the conversation that they talked for 30 minutes about something as arbitrary as “what is your cat doing today?”.
The agent hung up the phone and never really even asked a closing question or anything about the property that was for sale. They basically just said “hey, let me list your house.” then just talked randomly when the person said no. - The seller just isn’t ready yet. This happens. Sometimes, they put a FSBO ad on craigslist and they do actually want to sell their house. But they have no plan at all for showing the home to anyone. They have work, a spouse, kids, dog, 10 unfinished projects and they have no clue where they would go if someone showed up on their door step with a bag of cash to pay their asking price.
- They do not have enough information about the service they are being offered or they were just misinformed about how real estate agents work.
Imagine that, very similar reason we give lead generation companies objections. We just don’t know enough about what they are doing for us.
Believe it or not, I have been on listing appointments, where the reason why they hadn’t already listed their home with an agent is, they didn’t know how agents worked. I have had people that didn’t know we get paid on performance. Most of us are not asking for a commission check upfront. - They did not know how hard it would actually be to sell their house on their own (or how costly). With only around 50% of Americans owning homes, the percentage of Americans to actually go through the experience of selling a home is pretty small. I would be willing to bet your average seller has probably never worked with an agent to sell a house or at least they have not sold a property in the last 5 to 7 years, in the state they are in.
I think this is often why sellers start our very strong, “hey we are selling ourselves” is their motto. Until they realize marketing on your own is tough, buyers “stretch the truth” about finances, attorney charge a lot of money and people never want to come see your house when it is convenient. Oh and I forgot, everyone calling from craigslist is looking for a “Rent to Own”. - The agent before used an “A SOS” script. The agent they talked with before just was a bad or rude. They only cared about making a commission check. They never answered their phone. They never had any showings or feed back. They just assume other agents will be the same.
- It just was not a good time. This is different than “I am not ready”.Sometimes when you call a seller it just isn’t a good time. Just like the examples in the last chapter. They had a million things going on, talking to a real estate agent for 5 minutes just made it a million and one things.
I am not telling you these are the only 6 reasons sellers are giving us objections, but I think this sums it all up pretty well and shows you that often an objection has very little to do with you.
On a basic level we all react a certain way to certain things. We all give objections.