Look out the window. It might be a clear, sunny morning, or it might be a cold, dreary downpour. Whatever it is, it’s just a fact. You don’t get to vote on the weather, and yelling at the clouds won’t dry your suit.
The exact same thing applies when you’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to an open home. You can fume behind the wheel, or you can accept the reality that you aren’t just stuck in the traffic, you are the traffic.
Neither the weather nor the traffic is within your control. They aren’t inherently good or bad; they simply exist.
As Mark McLeod, Ray White Group’s Chief Strategy Officer, often points out, the property market works the exact same way. Yet right now, it feels like agents are facing a daily barrage of external noise.
In Mark’s view, shifting tax laws are keeping investors cautious, the media is fixated on doom-and-gloom real estate headlines, and buyer sentiment feels skittish. It’s easy to point at the news or the tax department and blame them for a quiet weekend. But few agents thanked the market when properties were practically selling themselves, so blaming it when things get tough doesn’t hold much weight.
Blaming the headlines won’t write contracts. The agents who thrive in today’s environment are the ones who stop worrying about what parliament or the media is doing and instead focus on what they can control: their attitude, their time, and their process.
Reallocating your hours
When the market was booming, packed open homes meant agents spent entire days just servicing callbacks. Today, if foot traffic at open homes is lighter, logic dictates that you suddenly have hours up your sleeve. How you reallocate those hours will define your trajectory.
Instead of waiting for organic traffic to show up, you have to actively drive it. You can’t change the tax laws, but you can control how many calls you make to your database before lunch. Proactive outreach is how you fill the gap.
However, the biggest mistake agents make when driving this traffic is trying to jump straight to a deal – trying to force a buyer who is ready today onto a vendor who hasn’t accepted where the market currently sits. In a shifting market, your first job with buyer traffic isn’t to force a sale; it’s to build a solid platform of information.
Every buyer interaction gives you real-world data: raw feedback, pricing sentiment, and genuine reactions to current market conditions. When you collect that information methodically, you stop having emotional, defensive conversations with your vendors. Instead, you sit down with them as a trusted advisor, backed by hard evidence of what the market is actually saying.
Keeping stock in motion
Once you have that platform of information, the real work begins: repositioning your stock. Properties cannot be left to sit idle while you hope the news cycle improves or tax policy changes. Stock needs to be moving every single day.
Repositioning doesn’t just mean dropping the price. It means looking at the entire strategy. It’s tweaking the marketing, shifting the method of sale, refreshing the presentation, or simply bringing a different energy to the pitch. Your success in this market is directly tied to how effectively you keep your stock in motion.
Creating the sale is simply the natural byproduct of executing those steps in order: driving traffic, gathering accurate feedback, and repositioning the property until it lands in the sweet spot. When you try to skip straight from traffic to a sale without doing the groundwork in between, listings stall and vendors lose trust.
You can’t control the tax laws. You can’t control the morning headlines. And you certainly can’t control the market. But you have total control over your pipeline, your communication, and your daily execution. Stop worrying about the forecast and start mastering your process.
Updated feature, Stop Blaming the Market — Control What You Can, first published in March 2025.