Median price is up 2.4 percent. Inventory is down 15 percent. Sales are down 6.3 percent. None of that, Jonathan Miller told a room of agents at Inman Connect San Diego, is what wins a listing.
Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc. and director of markets at StreetMatrix, argued during his session, “The Data Advantage,” that the agents winning listings right now are not the ones citing the most statistics. They are the ones who can translate hard numbers into a story a seller trusts, he said.
“The plural of anecdotal is not data,” Miller said, describing a widely repeated internet claim he called false. Anecdotal information, sourced from people embedded in a local market, can be more current and more useful to a seller than closed sales data, which he said is inherently dated.
Miller pointed to the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, an anecdotal survey compiled across the Fed’s 12 regional banks, as a model. He has advised the Fed on the report for roughly two decades, he said.
“It’s very useful, and it’s actually closer to actual economic data than you give it credit for,” Miller said.
He also urged agents to look beyond one-dimensional statistics like year-over-year price changes and toward two-dimensional metrics such as months of supply, which combines inventory and sales pace to reflect how a market actually feels on the ground. A market can show slowing sales and still feel fast-moving to buyers and agents if inventory is falling even faster, he said.
Miller closed by telling agents to prioritize the full market story over raw data points.
“Pie is better than the cake,” he said.
Agents shift from pitch to conversation
The theme of moving beyond volume and hustle spilled over from a separate Connect session, “The Agent of the Future Is Already Here,” where Racquel Russell, Zillow’s vice president of agent success, and Jason Abrams, chief industry and strategy officer at Keller Williams, discussed patterns among top-performing agents.
Russell described a workshop Zillow hosted with its agent advisory board in Charleston, South Carolina, where 20 agents worked through their full listing strategies. Some agents still relied on standard pitch decks built around past sales, she said, while others had shifted toward walking sellers through a specific plan for winning and pricing the listing.
“We’re all consumers, and we’re all getting pitched all the time,” one agent in the workshop told Russell, explaining his reasoning for moving away from a traditional pitch. Sellers today have far more access to data than in the past, Russell said, and increasingly expect a strategic conversation rather than a sales pitch.
Abrams framed the shift in similar terms to Miller’s central argument: Raw information alone does not move a seller. “Nobody wants to be sold, but everybody wants to be consulted,” Abrams said. Agents who can translate market data into a specific plan for a seller, he said, are the ones winning listings in the current market.
