Every selling agent you've dealt with formed a view of you inside the first sixty seconds.
None of them ever told you what it was.

I know which buyer's agents were easy. I was the one taking the money.

For seventeen years I was the selling agent. Buyer's agents rang me every week, and most of them were good operators. They knew the contract. They knew the conditions. They ran a clean process and they looked after their clients.

And most of them were easy.

Not because they were lazy, and not because they were new. Because nobody had ever shown them what actually happens in a negotiation underneath the words being said. I could hear it in the first minute of a call. Most of the time I never had to work for the extra money — it was handed over, and the agent hung up believing they'd done a good job.

Here is the part that should bother you.

I never told a single one of them.

No selling agent does. You take the result, you're perfectly pleasant about it, and you move on to the next file. There is no version of this job where the person you just negotiated against rings you back to explain how they beat you.

Repetition without correction doesn't make you better. It makes you faster at the same mistakes.

Every other skill in your business comes with a scoreboard. A campaign works or it doesn't. A buyer signs or walks. A referral comes back or it goes quiet. You get told, so you adjust.

Negotiation is the exception, and it's worse than that — the scoreboard actively lies to you. You secured the property, so it reads as a win. The twenty thousand you left on the table doesn't appear on any report you'll ever see. Your client thanks you. The agent thanks you too, and means it.

Thirty deals, three hundred deals — the number only compounds whatever you were already doing. It's the difference between seventeen years of experience and one year of experience repeated seventeen times, and from the outside those two look identical.

A soft market doesn't punish everyone equally.

When stock moves easily, a mediocre negotiator and a good one look identical. Everything transacts. Nobody's skill is ever really tested, so the gap between the two never shows up on anyone's radar — including their own.

This isn't that market.

Buyers hesitate. Vendors hold. Agents run plays they wouldn't have bothered with two years ago. Every one of those is a test of the same skill, and the result is that the distance between operators has become visible — to clients, to the people who refer them, and to the agents on the other side of the table.

The buyer's agents who come through this stretch won't be the ones with the best marketing. They'll be the ones who can walk into a difficult negotiation and demonstrate, inside the room, that they're worth what they charge. The ones who don't will be the ones who were never able to show it — and who are now being asked to.

And by the time conditions ease again, the reputations will already have been handed out.

None of which is only a warning.

Markets move. They always have, and they always will. A market that moves is the one environment where the difference between one buyer's agent and another becomes legible enough for a client, a referrer or an agent to act on. When everything transacts, you are whatever your marketing says you are. When it doesn't, you are whatever you did on the hardest deal of the month — and that is the deal people repeat.

Which is why a stretch like this one makes careers rather than ends them — and why ninety minutes is better spent now than after everything settles.