“Listings are just too hard right now. I’m going to stick with buyers for a while.” I’ve heard some version of that from several agents recently. It’s an understandable reaction to a market where homes take longer to sell. It’s also a mistake.
I learned why early in my career. One of my first management mentors, George, poked his finger into my chest and told me, in more colorful language than this, “In real estate, there are only two things that matter: listings and recruiting. Everything else is secondary.”
It took me a while to understand what he meant: Listings were the only thing that mattered, and the point of recruiting was to get more of them.
If you lead a team, both points apply to you. If you’re an individual agent, it comes down to listings, and they matter more in this market, not less, because they create three things: more listings, more buyers and more control.
Buyers want to buy. Sellers have to sell
Buyers are excited when you meet them. They’re picturing a new kitchen, a bigger yard or a shorter commute. Looking at houses is fun.
Sellers are usually selling so they can buy. They have to pack up their lives and keep the house showing-ready, all while mentally subtracting the costs of selling from their equity. Selling a house isn’t as fun as buying one.
Buyer work takes real expertise, but it’s built on a client who is excited about the process. Listing work starts with a client who is less excited about the process than they are about getting the right price on the right timeline. That takes a different set of skills: earning the trust of someone who’s reluctant, educating them about the market and keeping them focused on the goal when momentum slows.
Those skills matter most in a market like this. In September 2021, the typical listing spent 41 days on the market. This September, it spent 61, according to Realtor.com data compiled by the St. Louis Fed.
Many agents learned the business when homes sold before the marketing even got started. They never had to carry a listing for months or figure out what to say to a seller whose home hasn’t had a showing in weeks. Falling back on buyers is one way to avoid that conversation, but in the long run, it’s the wrong business decision.
3 reasons for taking more listings
1. Listings create more listings
Taking a listing is the most visible marketing you can do in real estate. Neighbors drive past your sign twice a day. They walk through your open house to see what their place might be worth. When your listing sells, they know who sold it. When it’s time for them to sell, you’re the agent they’ve watched succeed.
That’s the cycle: Each listing helps you get more listings. A buyer-side closing shows up in the MLS. A sold sign shows up in front of the whole neighborhood.
2. Listings create more buyers
About a third of buyers find an agent on their own, without a referral or a past relationship, according to NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Most buyers interview only one agent, so the first agent they talk to is usually the one they hire.
Where do they meet that agent? Often through a listing: the sign they drive past, the open house they walk into or the property they ask about online.
You can still find buyers without taking listings by purchasing online leads. Paid leads can shore up a thin pipeline in the short term. But you’re renting buyers who came from someone else’s listings, at a price you don’t set, all while paying to build the aggregators’ brands instead of your own. The same money spent marketing yourself and your own listings builds brand equity and gets you off the paid-leads treadmill.
3. Listings create more control
Buyers take time, and we all only get 168 hours each week. One buyer can fill an entire Saturday with showings, and you can’t be in two places at once. That puts a hard limit on how many active buyers you can work with, no matter how organized you are. Listings don’t have that limit. With a solid process and reliable systems, you can carry far more listings than active buyers.
The control goes beyond time. As a managing broker, I saw the difference in my own offices. The agents who worked mostly with buyers were the ones asking me to approve commission advances or to sign off on reducing their commission to keep a deal together.
The listing agents rarely needed an advance, and they had too much in their pipelines to be pressured into paying for half a refrigerator to save a deal. Both groups asked for better splits. The listing agents were easier to say yes to, because I could see the future business I’d be investing in.
When your business runs on buyers, your income is capped by the hours in your week. When it runs on listings, your inventory keeps generating calls even when you’re not actively working.
The bottom line
My mentor’s rule has held up for decades because it describes how the business works in normal markets, not just hot ones. Listings create more listings, more buyers and more control. When homes take longer to sell, you need more listings, not fewer.
Prospect for buyers and you’ll find buyers. Prospect for sellers and you’ll find both.
George would have said it more bluntly, but he was right. It’s all about listings.
