🏡 What a Normal Real Estate Market Actually Looks Like

GROW WITH LIBERTAS & EXP REALTY

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For the past several years, buyers and sellers have had a warped idea of what a normal real estate market even looks like. We went from the pandemic frenzy — houses selling immediately, bidding wars, waived inspections, sellers expecting 20 offers over asking — straight into higher rates, longer days on market, and a much more cautious buyer.

The latest NAR numbers are useful because they show us what a genuinely balanced market looks like. Sellers may get two offers. Some get none instead of 20. Buyers are getting their inspections again. Deals take about 30 days to close. Negotiating is back. None of that means the market is bad. It just means real estate agents have to actually do their jobs again.

Today we walk through what a normal market looks like statistically, the five skills separating the agents who thrive in this environment from the ones who quit, the seasonal Q3-Q4 surge that's already loading, and the 10-Listings-in-90-Days interactive plan that will turn the next 90 days into your best window of the year.

Before the tactical points — one seasonal note that matters. Right now feels slow because it is. Kids are heading back to school. Families are resettling into routines. Vacations are ending. Late July and early August are normally the softest weeks of the year.

That's temporary. What comes next in Q3-Q4:

Meaning: if it feels slow right now, that's normal — but you have to be positioned to capture the surge when it hits. The activities, conversations, and listings you take now determine whether October delivers a career quarter or a modest one.

Related reframe. Your 2027 business year already started. The listings you take in August, September, and October are what close in November, December, and January. If you wait until January 1st to reset your goals, you've already lost the first six weeks of momentum.

Whether you're ahead of your 2026 goals, on track, or behind — the second half of the year is where the compounding happens. Don't emotionally disconnect just because kids are back in school and calendars feel chaotic.

We just deployed a completely rebuilt 10-Listings-in-90-Days (1090) plan as an interactive on Harris Real Estate Daily. Previously it was a static printable document. Now it's a full interactive that walks you through every single day of the next 90 with specific actions, scripts, and checkpoints.

Perfect timing to deploy it right now given the seasonal window.

To access: subscribe (or log in as a current subscriber) at harrisrealestatedaily.com. Current subscribers — it's under the Interactives tab in the top-right navigation. New subscribers — the link is in the welcome email.

Expired-listing volume is elevated in most markets right now. Austin specifically is producing enough expired activity to make the 1090 plan feel like it was built for the current window. Pull the list. Run the plan.

Now — the five skills that define a normal market.

The single most damaging seller mindset right now:

Sounds reasonable. It's usually a disaster.

Back in January, 36% of homes that were relisted came back at a lower price. That number has climbed since. Which means the start high and reduce strategy is producing predictable outcomes — long days on market, multiple price cuts, buyers wondering what's wrong with the house, and eventual sale prices below where the CMA said the house should have been priced originally.

Concrete example. Comps say $500,000. Seller insists on listing at $550,000. The $500K buyers don't make offers — they go buy another house instead. Seller reduces to $535K. Then $515K. Eventually gets to $500K. But now the property has been on the market for 70 days and buyers arriving at the correctly-priced number are asking their agents "what's wrong with this house?"

You don't get those first weeks back. The window when a property is fresh is the single most valuable marketing asset a listing has. Waste it on aspirational pricing and you're competing against your own stale listing for the rest of the process.

Real question that comes up in coaching constantly. What if the seller won't listen, other agents are telling them higher numbers to buy the listing, and you're about to lose the appointment?

Take the listing — but structure it professionally. Use the two-weeks-or-10-showings script:

Get it in writing. Signed acknowledgment on the trigger.

This does three things at once:

Take the listing. Have the listing when it sells. That's the whole game.

Related tool worth surfacing. The 180-Day Seller Communication Plan (a Premier Coaching interactive, previously the 90-day plan, now extended to match current market cycles) tells you exactly what to say to your seller every single week for the entire 180-day listing period.

Includes pre-built graphs, charts, market update templates, and infographics you can deploy to reinforce every conversation. Works in harmony with the two-weeks-or-10-showings script and the repositioning conversations that follow.

Plug in an address, launch the plan, and it tracks where you are for each individual listing you have active. If you're carrying 10 listings, it manages 10 separate 180-day sequences simultaneously.

Available to Premier Coaching subscribers. New Premier Coaching launch is imminent — watch for the announcement.

Here's the NAR stat that reframes every seller conversation right now. Homes that receive offers are averaging two offers. Not 15. Not 20. Two.

That number is critical because sellers are still stuck in 2021 mental models. They may have bought their current home when they had to compete against 15 offers. If they don't have 7 offers by Sunday night on their listing now, they think something's gone wrong.

Nothing's gone wrong. You only need one buyer to sell the house. If you have two legitimate offers, you now have competition — that's a healthy dynamic.

Never let a deal die in your court. If the house is listed at $500,000 and an offer comes in at $475,000, counter it. Keep the conversation moving. Remember — they didn't have to write an offer at all. The fact they wrote one means they want the house. Maybe you end up at $490,000 with negotiated closing costs, possession terms, or inspection concessions.

Work the offer. Do not be the agent who calls the seller and says "we got a terrible offer." Present the net first, terms second, price last. Counter everything. Even if the counter is exactly your list price. Even if it's a small movement. The point is to keep the conversation alive.

Second sub-point from the same NAR data. Showings-per-listing have dropped meaningfully in many markets.

Austin specifically: average showings per listing per month have dropped from around 17 last year to around 4 this year. Which means half the listings in Austin are getting fewer than 4 showings per month.

Implication: when someone actually schedules a showing, they're serious. You need to work every showing intentionally — request feedback, angle for the second showing, engage the buyer's agent proactively.

And critically — prepare your seller upfront for the reduced showing volume. If you haven't warned them that showings are lower in the current market than they were last year, and they only get 4 showings the first month, they'll fire you — not because you did anything wrong, but because you didn't prep them for what to expect.

Always set the bar a little lower than what you know you can deliver. Surprise them on the upside.

Another NAR stat that reframes every buyer conversation. Only 16% of buyers waived their inspection contingency in the last measurement window. Down from 23% a year ago. Which means 84% of buyers are getting inspections.

Use this with every hesitant buyer sitting on the sidelines because their picture of buying a house is still stuck in 2021.

For listing-side agents — you need to be prepared for this new normal. Smart buyer agents are coaching their buyers to offer close to asking price to lock up the house, then getting aggressive on inspection negotiations to extract concessions. This is called secondary negotiation.

The counter-move — pre-inspect your listings before they hit the market. Get the inspection done proactively. Disclose findings upfront. Kill the buyer's ability to use inspection findings as surprise leverage after the fact. This is one of the highest-leverage moves in the current market for listing agents and almost nobody does it.

Despite the social media posts from agents crying about how everything's blowing up, here are the actual NAR numbers.

The next time an inspection goes sideways, an appraisal has an issue, underwriting asks for one more document, or your buyer calls convinced the whole transaction is falling apart — remember the 94% number. Deals have problems. That's what deals do.

Old broker Rory used to yell at Julie for stressing about deal problems: "Don't expect everything to go perfect. Expect deals to have problems." Then remember 94% of them close anyway.

Where there's a will, there's a way. The seller still wants to sell. The buyer still wants to buy. It's just that you have to negotiate more.

Related warning for experienced listing agents. In the current market, you're going to end up working both sides of the deal more often than you're used to.

Not literally as a dual agent — but functionally. Because a lot of buyer agents entering the current market don't know how to put a deal together. They've never negotiated inspection concessions. They've never structured a rate buy-down. They've never handled an appraisal gap.

Which means the listing agent — if they want the deal to close — has to essentially quarterback both sides. Sometimes that means:

Egos will bristle at this. Walk carefully. But if you're the more experienced agent and the deal needs to close, be willing to do the work. Rory's rule — never let a deal die in your court — applies to your work as much as to the other agent's.

For buyer agents specifically — here's the professional move most agents skip. Before you write your buyer's offer, call the listing agent and ask for the crib sheet.

"What's important to your seller? What terms matter most to them? Where do we need to be to get this house in contract?"

Put your phone on speaker so your buyer can listen. Sometimes the listing agent will say "just make your best offer" — that's a weaker listing agent who hasn't done their prep work. But often — especially in the current market — the listing agent has been given explicit instructions from the seller: "Bring all offers. We're motivated. Here's what matters to us."

When your buyer hears those words directly from the listing agent's mouth, the entire offer strategy changes. Now you're writing an offer designed around what will actually get accepted, not what you're guessing might work.

Here's the reframe that pulls the whole episode together. We are not in a distressed market.

That's not a market falling apart. That's a market where people are still buying and selling houses — but transactions are no longer automatically happening. You have to work them.

Which is exactly where great agents earn all the money.

That's normal real estate. It's exactly what agents did every year for the four decades before 2020 distorted everyone's expectations. The pandemic-era instant multiple offers were the anomaly. This is the norm.

If you've built your entire career during the 2020-2022 window, you've never sold in a normal market. Which is actually your opportunity. While everyone else panics because they don't have the skills for this environment, the professionals who invested in coaching, scripts, and fundamentals during that window are quietly having their best years.

One closing philosophical note. As the experienced agent in transactions with less-experienced counterparts — set the example.

You'll probably run into that agent again on two or three deals over the next few years. If they're getting better each time, that improvement was partly your influence. Their client may become your client 5-7 years from now.

Be nice to each other. Buyer agents and listing agents. The industry is smaller than it feels. Reputations compound.

Half of what Tim and Julie learned when they were actively selling came from working across the table from great agents whose counter language, contract clauses, or negotiation tactics they borrowed and made their own. The Ultimate Addendum itself was a product of doing deals with really great agents.

Pay it forward. Even in a competitive market.

Simple this week:

One — subscribe to Harris Real Estate Daily at harrisrealestatedaily.com if you're not already. The 1090 plan interactive is in the welcome email for new subscribers, or under the Interactives tab for current subscribers.

Two — pre-inspect at least one of your active listings to see how the process works. Prepare to make it standard practice.

Three — memorize the four core NAR stats for use in every seller and buyer conversation this week: 2 offers per receiving listing, 16% waived inspections, 30-day typical close, 94% deal-close rate.

Four — call the listing agent before your next buyer offer and ask for the crib sheet. Track what changes.

Welcome back to normal real estate. 2 offers is a successful listing. Buyers get inspections again. Deals still close 94% of the time in about 30 days. Only 2% of sales are distressed. And negotiating is back — the way it always was before the 2020-2022 anomaly.

None of that means the market is bad. It means agents have to do the actual work of real estate again. Which is exactly why the skilled professionals are winning right now and the ones who came up during the frenzy are quietly exiting.

Not surviving. Thriving. Get to work.

Ready to stop guessing and start producing?

🎯 Start Premier Coaching (free trial): premiercoaching.com
💼 Build wealth with Tim's eXp team: whylibertas.com/harris
📲 Elite Coaching — text Tim directly: 512-758-0206

If you internalized that this is a normal market — not a broken one — and deployed the 1090 plan, the 180-day seller communication plan, the pre-inspection listing strategy, and the crib-sheet buyer-offer call for the next 90 days, how many more listings and closings do you produce by December than you would have coasting through just waiting for rates to drop?

— Tim & Julie Harris

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