When interest rates rise, everything in the housing market slows down. Higher borrowing costs have made buyers hesitant, stretched decision-making, and left sellers holding back. Deals take longer to close, and uncertainty becomes the new normal.
Some agents respond by stalling while others push through the lag, continuing to grow despite the headwinds.
According to US real estate coach Tom Ferry, the difference isn’t talent, luck, or market conditions, it’s behaviour.
“Some people seem to constantly outperform their potential,” he announced on his Outlier Series. “Others fall below it. They’re not bad people… they just don’t align their behaviours with what they want to accomplish.”
That distinction becomes sharper as conditions tighten; in easier cycles, momentum can disguise inconsistency, listings move quickly, buyers compete, and even a fragmented approach can produce results.
But when the market slows, the business strips back to its core inputs: conversations, discipline and follow-through.
“At the end of the day, you don’t get paid on expectations,” Tom says. “You get paid on behaviours.”
This idea sits at the centre of his “outliers” philosophy, a focus on agents who outperform not because of superior tools or tactics, but because of their ability to execute the basics, repeatedly, long after the initial motivation fades.
One such agent, featured in Tom’s recent interview series, built a US$500,000-plus commission business within his first year, not through innovation, but through repetition.
His early months were unremarkable – no deals in January, a handful in February and another quiet patch soon after.
“The first month I did zero,” he recalls. “February I did two. March I did zero, and then from there it went up.”
The turning point was not a breakthrough strategy but a willingness to persist through the lag, the often uncomfortable gap between effort and outcome that becomes more pronounced in a slower market.
“It does take a minute,” he says. “It’s getting out of orbit, you’ve got to push out and it does become easier.”
In a rising-rate environment, that lag is where many agents lose momentum. Transactions take longer and fall over more frequently, making the connection between activity and results less immediate. Without quick wins, doubt creeps in, prospecting slows, and pipelines thin further.
Tom sees this pattern repeatedly, particularly among agents who shift their focus away from direct client contact and towards lower-yield activities.
“In this industry, you can get so distracted,” he says. “Posting on social, reading the next thing… while important, what’s now business to fuel the rest of your business?”
For those outperforming the market, the answer is rarely complicated. It is also rarely comfortable. Cold calling. Follow-up. Repetition.
“Do you have days where you don’t feel like doing it?” Tom asks during the interview.
“Forty per cent of the time,” comes the reply.
The difference, he suggests, is not motivation but compliance with a simple rule: do it anyway.
“Most of the time I just do it… statistically, if I’m not doing the call, I’m not going to be where I want to be.”
That level of discipline becomes a dividing line when the market tightens. When transactions are easy, most agents work.
When they are not, only some maintain the same level of activity, and it is in that gap that market share quietly shifts.
Tom is direct about what sits behind that consistency – it is not optimism, nor circumstance, it is personal responsibility.
“There’s no outside factor that’s getting in the way,” he says. “You don’t get paid on expectations. You get paid on behaviours.”
He is also dismissive of the idea that external conditions, whether interest rates, platforms, or competitors, are decisive.
“No one’s coming to rescue you.”
For agents waiting for borrowing conditions to ease or buyer confidence to return, it is a confronting message. But it reflects a broader truth about property cycles: they reward those who act early, not those who wait for certainty.
Because when the market eventually turns, as it always does, the advantage rarely belongs to those who paused. Tom explains it belongs to those who kept working while others recalibrated.
In that sense, higher rates do not so much suppress opportunity as redistribute it. In a market defined by hesitation, the agents who continue to move, steadily, consistently, and often without immediate reward, are the ones most likely to find it.
