During the earliest part of the Great Recession, D.R. Horton — the largest homebuilder in the country — asked me to build its national sales training program.
I started in the markets getting hit hardest — a lot of time in Florida, plus divisions across the country where sales had slowed, cancellations were climbing, and buyers were suddenly behaving differently.
Then I got called to the corporate headquarters. Most people assume that means Fort Worth, but back then, the unofficial “headquarters” was an expansive ranch in the middle of West Texas, where Don Horton wanted to know exactly what his company needed to do to keep selling houses.
I told him what I was seeing: Buyers still wanted new homes, but a lot of them were trapped. They owed more on their current house than it was worth.
It wasn’t unwillingness. It was math working against them. And it was already starting to show up in the news.
Horton listened. Then he pointed his finger at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me this already?”
He wasn’t out of touch — he already knew what was being reported publicly. He was saying he expected the people closest to the buyers to know it first and tell him about it.
That’s stuck with me for almost two decades now, because it names something we forget about in this business: market intelligence is what you know before the data shows up. By the time everyone can read the report, it’s not worth much anymore.
Homeowners get this instinctively. They can pull a free Zestimate any day of the week.
What they can’t see is what’s happening in competing houses. Why the listing across the street had 20 showings and zero offers. Why three separate buyers walked into the same kitchen and started mentally pricing out a remodel. Why the house everyone expected to sell in 48 hours is still sitting there on Day 46.
And they definitely don’t know what a buyer would actually pay for their house, today, right now.
There’s a piece of advice always floating around real estate that sounds perfectly reasonable: “The seller just needs to price it right, and it’ll sell.” Clean, simple, a little smug. As if somewhere there’s a spreadsheet with the one true number on it.
It doesn’t always work when prices are softening.
When values are climbing, pricing is forgiving almost to the point of embarrassment. Buyers compete. Offers stack. Somebody ignores every comp their agent handed them and pays $20,000 over ask because they have to have the house with the blue front door. The market corrects your mistakes for you.
A declining market does the opposite. Gravity’s working against you, and suddenly everyone wants to pretend pricing is still an exact science.
It isn’t. Comps still matter — they’re where every good agent should start, and appraisers lean on them for good reason. But comps are history. They tell you what buyers were willing to pay six weeks ago, six days ago, sometimes six hours ago. It’s yesterday’s forecast.
What you need is what’s happening in the field, right now, with real buyers.
What separates the agents who get this right
If pricing is detective work, most agents are trying to solve the case from behind a desk. The ones who consistently get it right are out where the actual evidence is.
That’s actually how I saw DR Horton put the philosophy to work so long ago. Not long after that meeting with Horton, the company started sending four-person teams into the communities that were struggling — a week at a time, boots on the ground, to figure out what was actually wrong.
The first thing I’d do was visit every local real estate office in the area to ask questions:
- What were their buyers saying about the community, the house plans, the pricing?
- Were their agents actually showing it, or quietly leading people elsewhere?
- What were buyers looking for that they weren’t finding?
Then I’d plant myself at the sales center for a few days and take notes myself, so I could hear it straight from buyers.
By week’s end, we’d compare notes and hand over our recommendations. It showed how seriously the company took market intelligence.
But the real lesson was simpler: None of what mattered that week was sitting in a report. It was in the conversations. In resale, we like to tell ourselves it’s different — that we’re too small an operation for that kind of legwork. It isn’t, and we’re not. Gathering intelligence is still where the job actually happens.
A few habits worth building into your week:
- Work your grapevine: Sales meetings aren’t just admin — they’re where agents let their guard down about what’s really happening in their deals. Listen.
- Show up to broker opens: Eat the free pasta. Walk the listing. Ask the host what they’re hearing, not what the flyer says.
- Call competing listing agents: Ask, “What kind of activity are you seeing?” “Showings but no offers?” “Are buyers pushing back on price, condition or both?” You’ll be surprised how much people share when someone simply asks.
- Work your own open houses: The gap between “We like it” and “We’d buy it if … ” is where pricing problems reveal themselves.
What it looks like today
In a rising market, the market often corrects your mistakes. A bidding war can rescue an ambitious price. In a declining market, nothing rescues you. The intelligence you gather before you price the home is the strategy.
Then the market starts talking back. No showings, plenty of showings but no offers, buyers stumbling over the same objection — it’s all feedback that either confirms your price or exposes it.
Pricing in a declining market isn’t all about comps. It’s about staying close enough to buyers to hear what the data hasn’t caught up to yet. Don Horton wasn’t asking why sales had slowed. He was asking why the people closest to the buyers hadn’t told him first. Twenty years later, I still think that’s our job.
Roxanne Hale is the associate broker of the Art House Team, Brokered by RealtySouth in Birmingham, Alabama. Get connected on Facebook or YouTube.
