The Fed raised rates last week for the first time since 2023, and the 30-year fixed moved up with it. If your first instinct was to skip the client update this week, that instinct is worth paying attention to. Not because skipping it is the right call. It isn’t. But because of what it says about how you have been showing up.
A lot of agents only appear in a client’s inbox when there is something to sell. Record list prices, more inventory, rates dipping. When the headline turns, there is nothing left to say, so they go quiet. Then they reappear a few months later when the news improves, and the client can feel exactly what that is.
Being an advisor means having more than one thing to talk about.
5 emails to send your real estate clients when the market news is bad
1. Send the bad news too
You already know this one. You do it on every deal. You call about the failed inspection, you call about the low appraisal, and you do it because going quiet would be worse. Nobody enjoys that call, and everybody makes it.
For most agents, that instinct stops at the closing table. Market news gets treated as optional in a way inspection findings never are, and it gets filtered for whatever sounds encouraging.
Your clients are going to come back to you and refer you business because they trust you to deliver the good, the bad and the ugly. Not because everything you sent them was good. Send the rate news this week.
2. Keep a monthly valuation running no matter what
My clients get some kind of property valuation from me every month. Mine is automated, which is the only way it survives a busy month, but the point is that it does not depend on me having something to say.
If your database is small enough, make it better than automated. I know agents who run a real CMA, print it and send it. That lands differently than a system email, and your clients know the difference.
3. Cover the local government stuff nobody else is covering
This is the one almost nobody does. Your board of supervisors met last week and made decisions that affect what your clients’ homes are worth. Send a recap.
It takes 20 minutes, it makes you the person who pays attention, and it builds a relationship that is not tied to whether they are buying or selling.
4. Translate national stories down to their street
Data centers are a huge topic in my market. They are also a national story now, and a polarizing one, which means your clients are reading about them somewhere with no idea what any of it means where they live.
We are getting national studies on data centers, and we are getting local ones, and they do not always land in the same place. The national picture is mixed depending on where you look. The local picture is the one your client actually lives in. Both are worth sending, and the useful part is you telling them which one applies to their street.
That gap is yours to fill, and almost nobody is filling it.
5. Send something that has nothing to do with real estate
Make it fun sometimes. Community events, things happening this weekend, the stuff people actually talk about.
Customizing this is harder than it sounds, so here is the shortcut: Sign up for alerts from your local publication, the ones that run ten things to do this weekend, and get those in front of your clients. Forward it, copy and paste it, whatever is fastest. It is a touchpoint that is not real estate-related, and it keeps the whole relationship from feeling transactional.
The week to start is this one
None of this works as a reaction to bad news. If the first non-transactional thing a client hears from you arrives the same week rates jumped, it reads as damage control.
It works when it has been running for a while, which is why this week is a good week to start. Send the rate update, then send something else.
