I was in Perth last week for REIWA Connect – and what a great day, packed with genuinely useful tips from three workstreams – sales, commercial and property management.
Rather than a blow-by-blow of every session, here are a few of the many takeaways from this year’s event.
1. Stop calling them “difficult conversations”
Caroline Bolderston made a point that I think most of us already know but haven’t done anything about: when you label a conversation as “difficult” before you’ve even had it, you’ve already lost the room. Your body tenses up. You either avoid it entirely or you wing it – and neither ends well.
Her reframe is simple. Call it a PDC – a Powerful Direct Conversation. That’s not just word games. It shifts you from dreading the thing to preparing for it.
The structure she shared is worth writing down: calibrate first (ask the client how they’re feeling), reconnect with their dream (why are they doing this in the first place?), summarise the situation in plain terms, name the challenge clearly, then give them options – not instructions.
The part that stuck with me: when you give people options, they choose. When you tell them what to do, they resist. That applies to price adjustments, sure. But it also applies to just about every conversation you’ll have this week.
2. AI slop is killing your relationships one impersonal interaction at a time
This one’s mine, so forgive the self-reference, but it needed saying. We’ve all seen it by now – the Facebook comment that reads like a press release. The LinkedIn post with fourteen paragraphs, six subheadings and a “let me be clear” from someone who’s never spoken like that in their life. The listing description that sounds like it was written by a thesaurus with a real estate licence.
That’s AI slop. And your clients can smell it.
Every time you let a chatbot reply on your behalf without bothering to make it sound like you, a tiny piece of trust evaporates. One impersonal interaction at a time, the relationship you spent years building starts to feel like it’s with a machine – because it is.
The fix isn’t to stop using AI. It’s to stop being lazy with it. If your Facebook comments need a TLDR or a table of contents, something has gone wrong. If your emails read like they were generated by someone who has never met the recipient, they were – and the recipient knows it.
Your job is to sound human. AI can do the thinking. The voice has to be yours.
3. If they’re not doing what they know to do, they’re not lazy – they’re stressed
Tanja Lee said something that should be on a poster in every office: “You cannot change what you cannot see.”
She walked the room through the neuroscience of stress – fight, flight, freeze – and made a case I hadn’t heard framed this way before. When someone avoids prospecting, when they doom-scroll for eight hours instead of working on the project they cleared the day for (she copped to this one herself), when they get defensive the second you mention call numbers – that’s not a character flaw. That’s a nervous system in survival mode.
The practical bit: your state is contagious. You have an electromagnetic field that can be felt three metres away. If you walk into a listing consultation – or a Monday morning meeting – still wound up from the last call, the room knows. And they respond to your stress, not your words.
Her advice? The breath is the fastest way back to coherence. And the most influential person in the room isn’t the loudest or the most prepared – it’s the most regulated.
Your Wednesday Checklist
Here’s a list you can screenshot and take back to the office this week:
- [ ] Does your AI sound like you – or a robot? Read your last five AI-assisted emails, comments or posts out loud. If you wouldn’t say it that way in person, rewrite it until you would – or set up your AI so it does this automatically.
- [ ] Do your Facebook comments need a TLDR? If your social media replies are longer than the post you’re replying to, or include bullet points and subheadings, that’s not engagement – that’s slop. Keep it human. Keep it short.
- [ ] Audit your AI tools. Do you know what every team member is using? Make a list. Then ask: do the outputs actually serve the customer, or just save us time?
- [ ] Reframe one conversation this week. Pick a conversation you’ve been avoiding and run it through Caroline’s PDC structure: calibrate, reconnect with the dream, summarise the situation, name the challenge, give options.
- [ ] Check your state before you walk in. Before your next client meeting, take 60 seconds. Breathe. Regulate. Tanja’s right – they can feel you before you say a word.
- [ ] Do one thing that isn’t about today. Mat Steinwede built a career on ten handwritten CMAs a day, every day, on top of everything else. Not because it paid off that week. Because it paid off fifteen years later, when the family called him instead of the agent down the road. What’s your version of that?