In and out of real estate, noise is everywhere. In this Storii Time episode from 2025, our hosts Saad and Mike, talk about all the noise in real estate, the world, and how to block it out to get the job done.
Saad: Guys, we’re excited about today’s topic. I think it’s a really important one, not just for our business, but just in general, right? Noise. There’s all types of noise happening right now, specifically in real estate. Last year, you had the commission headlines, mean, kind bleeding into this year, right? Other changes to the MLSs and all that stuff. Some people were talking about it’s the end of buyer agents and all this stuff, and lot of people are getting scared, part-time agents like some of them like you know fizzled away but many others like just you know we’re not afraid of that. Recently, you have those clear cooperation headlines as well. They continue to be in the news. Those continue to be in the news. We’ll chat about that in a second you know and of course…talking about macro issues you have high interest rates you’ve got concerns of a recession tariffs. So, new tariffs were announced today things like that and you know there’s other agents and what they pose, trying to compare yourself to others as you try and grow your business. Whether you’re cool.
Mike: We all fall susceptible to it….right?
Saad: And like that’s a very real thing. That is noise. We’ll touch on that in a second. You have client situations, right? And we could talk about that. That could be a whole topic in and of itself. Saad: You know, some examples….You’ve worked with a client for a while and they’ve decided to move out of state. Right?
Saad: Like that is noise like chirping in your ear, right? That’s like makes you feel a type of way, especially when you put, you know, a lot of effort in with a client. You have clients getting cold feet. You have clients that are getting nervous about an inspection. You have friends who use another agent. Like these things happen. It’s all types of noise. And we’re going to dive into each little piece. And if you guys that are listening have examples of noise as well, whether it’s in your lives, whether it’s in real estate and oh we’ll try to touch on that, as well.
Saad: Nate, obviously, being in real estate as a lender. Kelly, having worked with us in the past as well.
Mike: She might view us as noise.
Saad: I that’s what I posted on my story yesterday, right? Is that we like to make noise. We do. And I meant that facetiously, but not. Like, we do like to make noise, but we fall susceptible sometimes, as all humans do, to the other noise out there. Like good, bad, and ugly, right?
Saad: So, Kelly says, you’re not, we’re not noise. Thank you. Too kind, too kind. That’s too nice. We did not pay her, I promise. At least not anymore.
Saad: We love you, Kelly. So let’s dive into this, Mike.
Saad: Like what are, like in terms of like industry and economic news, especially the macro stuff, like what is some of the noise out there? Let’s get into some of the details and how that impacts us individually and the industry at large.
Mike: Yeah, let’s start with it with industry, industry noise. I’d like to start with the buyer’s agent commission because that was like any change, right? Like good or bad, any change is going to cause a stir. And people didn’t really know what to make of it. You know what potential fallout there’d be from basically just having to talk to your buyers if you are representing them and discussing a commission ahead of time and just making sure you’re paid on that. And I think like what has come out of that has been actually good, at least from what I’ve seen.
Mike: It’s because in the past there would be your set buyer’s agent fee offered out by the sellers, bring this deal to a close by representing the buyers, and away you go. That was hidden in the MLS and the buyers wouldn’t, it would be like an afterthought of discussion on it. And, you know, it even had some people saying, which I was guilty of when I first started my career of like, I’m essentially free. free. I’m already in.
Mike: You know, like within like weeks of that, I was like, I don’t think that really makes sense. I’m built into the price. So, inevitably the buyer is paying the commission, it’s built into the price.
Mike: So, discussion of that with your buyers ahead of time, I think that that’s a very good thing. We love transparency here. We love making sure that everyone knows what’s about to happen and what’s about to go down. And Saad, you speak for your experience, but my experience has been, yes, has the commission offered out, have I had to like decrease it by a quarter of a percentage on sometimes just to make it work? Yes, but we were doing that anyway. There would be like, these two clients are like 5k away from completing this deal and you’d rather have a deal than no deal. So, sometimes the agents would go together and be like, if you decrease by 2,500, I’ll decrease by 2,500 just to get this deal done. It’s on the second sake of putting the deal together. So, I wouldn’t say that that’s like really oh anything different. I haven’t really had, besides blatantly writing it into the offer, I haven’t had any disruption in how I go about business.
Saad: Yeah, I mean, think I really have nothing to add there. think there’s two key things that you just said. Number one, for buyers, there’s more transparency. It is more clear how we as buyer agents get paid. And it’s the same way that it’s the exact same way we were getting paid previously. Now it’s just very clear. And now you definitely anybody who was saying that your services are free, you don’t pay me like…You definitely can’t say that anymore. That’s 100% not true. And again, it was not true before and it’s not true now. So, it does not change, it doesn’t change mechanically or logistically anything. There is more transparency though and I think that is good for the consumer, it is good for the business. That’s number one.
Saad: The second thing you said and probably like process-wise the biggest change is that it needs to be written in. That’s it. So, and I mean, one thing, I guess the third thing is the buyer agency agreement, which I mean, we could have a whole another discussion about that too. Like, we get them signed, but like you get them signed and nobody ever looks at them again. So it’s a funny thing that that’s like, it’s been an added thing that’s been put in there, but that has not changed whether it gets signed or not, which right now it sounds like process-wise, it should be. Whether it gets signed or not, it does not change what was being done before versus what’s happening right now when it comes to the buyer’s experience, the seller’s experience, the overall deal as a whole. So that’s an example again. mean yes, it is important as an agent, as somebody who’s in the industry, as if you’re a buyer or seller, yeah it’s important to know that stuff, but it is noise.
Mike: Right, right. the time it was ruled, that’s when all the noise happens, right? There’s always, and then I don’t know. Have people been really talking about it in last couple of months?
Saad: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. mean, think that we’re going to do some of these other things, but like, yeah, nobody’s been talking about it. in fact, numbers overall, I think the stats showed that commissions overall have gone up. And they should know that even part-time agents, they’re doing well. They’re doing better than previously, which I find fascinating. Right.
Saad: So again, it’s just another example of noise, think that clear cooperation headlines and like you know that for those who don’t know that basically the premise behind that is Compass, one of the largest brokerages in the world, know at least in the US, possibly the world, but like they wanted this, they want to like put an emphasis on this whole idea of a private listing and a listing that you can keep within your brokerage for really as long as you want to and one thing led to another and they’re not getting that, but what they are getting is another added feature on MLSs indicating you can keep it private, like still available to anybody on MLS, right? But it won’t go to all these websites like Zillow, Webfins, the private brokerage for a certain period of time. Again, and I’ve heard a few talks about this. It’s a lot of people saying like, you know, this impacts very few agents. It impacts very few sellers. It’s usually going to be those ones that we’re talking about celebrity homes. We’re talking about like super private people, right? That are trying to like keep it tight. And that’s what Compass was trying to do. They effectively were not successful in getting that done. But they basically just had an added feature that’s been added on MLS that further complicates things, but really for no reason. So, that’s another example, again, of noise. Business as usual for us, but there might be those nuanced situations where maybe not so much but yeah
Mike: There’s a catch with that of if something has to go to market if it’s going to be sold I think that the beneficiaries are the general population–everybody gets to see it–and you have the most eyes on your property to purchase it and it prevents any sort of nefarious activity…any discriminatory practices within that. And that’s what we want, right? We want it to be open to everybody. And then just like any other market, the person with the best offer gets the house.
Mike: There is like, I’m even thinking, for example, the last listing I sold, we were getting ready to go to sell it to market. It was a condo and a two-family and the upstairs unit decided to inquire about it, and they worked out their own deal on that. So, it never went to market. I took a step back and did it as like an overseer at a lesser percentage because those two had like worked out a deal just to make sure everything went smoothly. But that was the in the best interest for that seller. Like we want to do this, you know, and then that thing never went to market. So I could see the exceptions to the rules sometimes, because not every situation’s right. What comes out of all of this, we’ll see.
Mike: But you don’t want…you’re gonna tell everybody in your office if you have a listing ahead of time.
Saad: Of course, we do it. Yeah, we do it. I would love one of our other agents to, like Mike, we almost did a do it together in Watertown. It was my listing and he had a buyer. didn’t work out. We were actually under agreement. It didn’t work out. Definitely that is like a thing. It’s a reasonable business practice. to change the industry or change the platforms, it caused this confusion. That’s like the premise of this whole discussion. It’s stuff that was already happening, but to add a layer of complexity to, while the result is the same, it’s silly. So again, it confuses people.
Saad: You and I had a discussion, I think it was like early last week or maybe a couple of weeks ago. You even said to me…hey, I’m a little nervous about this.
Mike: Yeah, because if you don’t have to put something on the market, what happens to the sellers?
Saad: We’re not a Compass. We’re a small brokerage. How does it impact us? Especially in a low supply environment, that’s a very real concern, right? But it was noise that led to that.
Saad: Rapid fire on a few things because there’s a couple of other things we want to chat about, like high interest rates, that’s been something we’ve been dealing with for a while. Concerns of a recession, that’s been talked about also for a while, but especially lately with the talks of tariffs and costs in general going up, inflation naturally…what’s Trump gonna do? What is he not gonna do? Like all that stuff.
Mike: Yeah, think every single person is living in that purgatory right now.
Saad: Exactly. But the point is, and I equate noise to stuff that you cannot control. Like that’s the TLDR here, in my view. You cannot control. Any of stuff that we just talked about, you have virtually no control over, right? And whatever pieces you can control, it’s negligible. And not to say that it’s not worth trying your best to control what you can’t in those areas. But, it is negligible. These are like much bigger than you, myself, Torii, than even the state of Massachusetts. Like there’s so much more that’s happening that we don’t have control over. And your energy is much better spent on those things that you actually can control. And again, that’s a whole different topic.
Saad: But I want to get your take, Mike, on other agents and what they post, especially in this day of social media. How do you think about noise and the mindset involved when you look at some of these other things that agents are doing, not doing, posting, et cetera?
Mike: Yeah, I think a long… And not to say that it doesn’t come back and um rare it’s ugly, how they get it again, but I think…a long time ago, we learned the people who are trying to show a lot like a lifestyle or you can tell when somebody is trying to like stunt on you, right? Or somebody that makes it comes up to you at a networking event and is like immediately like, “what’s your volume?” Something like that. Or the people that like, you know, we make fun of the I’m a top 1% person or whatever.
Saad: You haven’t seen it already, go to our website, check out our video on our homepage. We specifically make fun of those agents. If you are one of those agents, yes, we’re making fun of you too.
Mike: Exactly, right? And it’s just like you do, you want to showcase a job that you’re doing, how much you’re in service of the clients that you’re representing and not like, look at me, look at me, look at me. And it’s really unfortunate that a lot of, you know, societal behavior is like this. But I think it’s, once you see it, that if somebody’s like leading with that, it means they’re insecure about it. It’s probably not true. Are you attacking a group of people? If so, you’re probably like insecure about like anything that you lead with and try to like over, almost like overcompensate for iis usually the weakness within yourself.
Mike: That’s how I feel… but it still doesn’t stop from every now and again, it’s like, oh shit, that person’s like really taken off. Like, and it’s human nature, you’re gonna have like a bit of jealousy. You have to keep reminding yourself that.
Saad: Yeah, I mean, think like, you know, it’s, again, it’s not just an agent thing. It’s like, you know, just because of social media in general, like, you take everything with a grain of salt. You have to, because a majority of what’s out there is nonsense…majority of what’s out there is fake. I think it’s, I think like you can tell who’s genuine, you can tell who’s authentic, you can tell who’s being real. And like, look, a little bit of flexing here, and there is okay. But Mike made a really important point. You want to be wary when people are leading with that flex, right? Or leading with the stunting. Like, I think that’s a very, very good point. And it’s easy to tell.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Saad: it’s easy. Very easy.
Mike: It’s easy to tell because you don’t want to talk to them. If you have that feeling of like, Oh God, get away from me.
Saad: It makes me not want to do business with them. It makes me it does make me think about like, like, you know, if I come across one of their listings, oh God, that’d be so annoying to this person. Yeah, I’m with you. I’m with you 100%. But I think the takeaway there is like, look, just be wary. And again, control what you can control, which is you. You can control your activity, you can control how you’re presenting yourself. Yes, in this business, like in a lot of businesses, you gotta brand yourself, you gotta do some marketing, social media’s a big part of that, all that stuff. But there’s some tact involved, and you gotta have to be authentic. Find that balance that works for you.
Saad: And that does not mean that you’re gonna come off the right way to everybody. Not everybody’s gonna like that, right? But honestly, who cares? Right? As long as you’re being true to yourself, as long as you’re being real, as long as you’re authentic, then your people will gravitate to you. And that’s what you can control. You’re gonna be so much happier that way. You’re gonna have the right mindset. You’re gonna be so much more passionate about what you’re doing, what you’re selling, all that stuff. And I think that is way more important than trying to flex on whatever it is that you’re trying to flex.
Mike: Well put.
Saad: So I think again it goes back to that whole point like control what you can control In the last few minutes that we have Mike let’s talk about client situations Yeah, again another example of something you cannot control and often situate in oftentimes I mean there’s some things you can, right? Part of our job is to be therapists My job is to educate our clients and have these like meaningful discussions with them that can sometimes help them get out of their own way right because oftentimes that’s what’s happening, is that they’re getting it their own way. And it’s our job to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.
Saad: Give me some examples of like, of those, of situations where you’re like, you something happens with a client, whether it’s a listing, you know, a buyer, what have you, and shit just hits the fan.
Mike: Yeah, when it comes to, you know, uncovering things at the property or somebody, well, we, in fact controlled the other partners involved in a deal by heavily venting that and getting reliable people….so that I’m trying to think of like an overarching theme in my brain. And I think the one is that, you know, the difficult conversations are much better had early on…because sometimes you can get swept up into like overlooking and then like in your mind, you’re like, oh my God, this is gonna be a great sale and it’s gonna close and my numbers are gonna be great or whatever. But if there’s not that baseline where you’re giving people…creating a space for them to be completely honest with you.
Mike: When you think about it in the past, the ones that have blown up, didn’t you really see it earlier on than it then went into for the most part.
Saad: Oftentimes do get a inkling that like, right.
Mike: Something goes off. Something’s coming. Yeah. Yeah. hear you on that. Yeah. Hey, look, there are also times when, it comes out of that field. Right?
Saad: But like example, I had a client who, uh, who had a PNS signed, right? The person to sell agreement was signed. Thankfully for him and for all of us a week before his commitment, he lost his job. Right? Like, uh, nobody could have seen that coming. Nobody could have seen that coming, but he lost his job. Like he’s not going to get his loan.
Mike: And I think that that’s understandable amongst everybody of like, Nobody wanted that to happen. There’s nothing nefarious going on. It’s just a simple fact that happens.
Saad: That happens, right? It happens. But again, you can’t control these things. These things will happen. The more deals you do, the more times things will go sideways, right? Because things go sideways, like in real estate and in life. So that’s just one example. of like a client situation that you don’t have control over. I mentioned earlier, you know, I had a client reach out to me recently and I’d only shown her a few places, but she recently told me that, you know, she’s moving out of state and she’s going to Chicago, right? Like that’s no longer a client for me, right? Unfortunate, but I don’t have any control over that. I get it… cost of living is much lower there, right? And that’s a factor for people, right? And they got to do what makes the most sense for them. Clients getting cold feet. Right? Like it’s happened to all of us. If you’ve done, if you don’t, you don’t even have to be doing a lot of deals. You just do some deals. You’ll get examples of situations where clients get cold feet, and you cannot convince them. You cannot convince them to get out of their own way.
Mike: I think that’s the point that I’m harping on…you can kind of, you have inklings of, of that. You don’t hear from somebody in a day when they were at 100 miles an hour and then you’re just like, ah, you know, something’s up.
Saad: Can you share your example of that client? You know, the three times.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Last summer, and they’re nice as can be…but I think my after something is finished, I always go back and like, OK, what could I have done differently like here in this circumstance, you know, we get one under agreement. There was like a neighbor complaint about there was a pipe leading into their yard and somebody complained at the time that needed to be rerouted or something like that. So, we were we were under agreement. Then I don’t hear from them for 12 hours. I like, this really shouldn’t be a problem or not 24 hours. And they’re like, well, we don’t like going into a house with the neighbors already complaining about something.
Mike: The fact that that thing exists does not have an inherent emotion to it. You can look at it as, we’re solving it. It’s an opportunity for me to meet my neighbor. We need to do anything wrong. We’ll talk to them. And then at the end of it, or you can look at it as, if they start with that, they’re just going to not never stop complaining and we’re moving. So, back out of that understood it.
Mike: Next one, inspection was okay, but there were a few things that definitely could have been negotiated, but there was no willingness to talk that over and explore our options. It was immediate, like, I’m going to pull out of this. And at that point, you’re just like, meh, okay, something’s awry here. But according to them, their timeline was to move in and be ready for kindergarten for the child and that school district and everything.
Mike: And we get to the third one. And then it was finally a call of like they finally admitted to themselves. We’re not ready for this. And I could have, went along with it, but I should have earlier had been like, Hey guys, are you sure? Is anything up? There anything that you want to talk about? And I think a lot of people are fearful of the reaction of the other side of that. Like, you know, what can I really do? Like nothing, but in your mind, I think you can make up any circumstance that is problematic, but really I should have been the one to take the lead and set like set the space.
Saad: Yeah, I mean I think that’s an example of like look nobody’s perfect and you know sometimes you want to like just be the nice guy and not have the tough conversations.
Saad: Imran, what’s up man? Thanks for joining. We got Saman in the house. We got Matt in the house. Zed, what’s going on everybody?
Saad: So, I think like that’s an example of like what you could control is your learnings.
Mike: Yeah.
Saad: Right? What you can control is like what are you gonna do better next time? And I think that’s really important. Like you cannot, there’s no sense in pointing fingers. There’s no sense in like getting down in the dumps like it’s over. Like it is what it is. You move on, you gotta look forward, all that stuff. And I think that’s the key is that you set it yourself, right? You’re like, you internalize to try and figure out what did I do wrong so I can create a better experience for the next person or the next time these folks come around. When they are ready. And I think that’s, again, that’s the most you can do in those situations.
Saad: Look, running a business, any type of business, but real estate, especially because you’re running around town… time is money. got to be cognizant of your time. And I think the next time you’re going to be much more cognizant because you don’t want to be hopping around to all these homes. And you don’t want to be spending the time negotiating. You don’t want to be spending the time putting the paperwork together and going to inspections. Like we’re talking hours upon hours of work that led to nothing. And that’s just like, you know, that’s just, that’s just not good business. So, you have to be cognizant as a business person, right?
Saad: Another example I want to bring up and just to like, you know, close this out is the whole like, you know, friends who use another example. Right? Like, look, it’s gonna happen. Sometimes clients sometimes like, you know, I’ve point blank asked people before, like, hey, like, why didn’t you work with me? Right? Like these are good friends of mine. Why didn’t you work with me? I’ve been told like, you know, I didn’t want to work with somebody who was like super close to them because they were worried about what would happen, right?
Saad: But I would not have known that if I didn’t ask. Yeah, right.
Mike: You could you can maybe build up resentment or something like that. So, those people who I have who have told me that after I asked them. Even if we had a conversation prior about us working together, but they’re trying to be nice and all that stuff, and they ended up using somebody else. Look, that is where it is. Some people just want to not have that difficult conversation. Or some people just don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to. I understand that too. But if I don’t ask that question after the fact, it’s like a… What do you call that word? When you’re trying to of do a… You’re trying to basically just do like a…
Mike: like a recon like or something.
Saad: You don’t go through that process, you don’t know those things and then you don’t know what you can improve upon later or just like be like, you know what? Now I realize it, look, that’s a real thing. Like people, some people might, I’ve had situations where somebody was trying to avoid working with me for a while until they used a few agents who were like, these people all suck. And then now he’s bought two homes with me. There’s those situations too, but you don’t really know. You don’t know that until you ask these questions until you ask those. Do you have those difficult conversations?
Mike: It really sounds like we’re running a dating show now. Actually, this sounds very applicable.
Saad: Maybe that’s an idea.
Mike: Here’s my PSA trying to be nice. Never works. Respectful works, but nice…always or never works.
Saad: Yeah, right, Yeah, respect. You’re 100% right. You want to be respectful. You want to be relatively humble. Yeah. Right, right. And I say relatively because like, you know, you want to be humble as a person, but you don’t want to be overly humble in business because people will take advantage of you, right? So, I think it’s, there’s something to be said about that. But I think in general, you’re 100% right. Iif you’re not having those difficult conversations, you’re not going to grow. You’re not going to like figure out what you can do better later on. Like, let’s face it, man, I’m sure you both, I’m sure you too, like I have lost friends over this business. I have. I’ve lost a couple of people that I was really good friends with and I’m not anymore because of just the way they handle these situations, right? Again, I’m an adult, right, and I can take some bad news, but if I feel disrespected in some way, then that’s different. And I take it a certain type of way, but you can’t make it personal, but you got to move on.
Mike: Yeah, like that your friend saying like we’d rather not work with like people that were close with What are you gonna say to that? You just like yeah, okay? That’s your preference. I’m not gonna put get it.
Saad: I appreciate you being honest with me Yeah, and telling me that right and now and now I know right and it’s helpful for me to have those those data points because it’s something I’ll have in the back of my mind that like, you know, just because somebody knows me doesn’t mean that they’re going to work with me. In fact, in those situations, I might have to work a little bit harder to get as, so, so yeah, so I think, these are all examples of things you cannot control.
Saad: That’s, that’s like the headline here, including, you know, a baby in the background.
Mike: She sounded like, like the cat more so.
Saad: Just a reminder for anybody who’s joining last minute here, control what you can control. Those things are your passion, your drive, your activity, the experience you provide to whoever you’re working with, especially if you’re in a B2C business. And just doing right by the client, right? And all these things in totality help mold your mindset. Your mindset, you can’t control. And if you’re in the right place mentally, I think that’s what’s most important not all these exterior factors. I don’t know, if there’s anything else you want to add there.
Mike : I think that’s a nice little bow on whole thing. That’s good.
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