As market conditions shift, agents can no longer rely on momentum alone, making leadership, fundamentals, and adaptability critical to future performance. Here is what it takes to stay ahead.
Changing market conditions have put greater pressure on agents to sharpen their skills, adapt their strategies and strengthen the way they work with clients and teams.
According to real estate coach Michael Sheargold, while market performance varies between locations and property types, the fundamentals of high performance remain consistent.
Sheargold said that to be successful, agents need to start recognising that they cannot rely on market conditions alone to drive results, putting an emphasis on continuous learning.
“You’ve got leaders and agents waiting for the market to change to suit their skill set and their business model. And you’ve got the other ones who are pivoting and saying I need to relearn strategies.”
Speaking on the REB Business Empowerment Showcase podcast, Sheargold said that adaptability sits at the heart of performance, with leadership, communication, sales fundamentals, and a clear business vision becoming critical as market conditions shift.
The market won’t save you
Throughout their careers, Sheargold said agents will sell across three distinct markets: a buyer’s market, a seller’s market, and a balanced market, with each requiring a different approach.
For agents who have only experienced one type of market, however, he said that a shift in conditions can expose gaps in both skills and strategy.
“If someone has been in the market or only been in real estate for a short period of time, it’s who turned the lights off. Agents need to understand what’s happening now”
While headlines focus on market drama, Sheargold said agents need to distinguish between what is happening externally and what is happening inside their own agency.
“There are two markets in real estate, the internal market and the external market. So if you’re not mastering the internal, it really doesn’t matter what’s happening on the external.”
The distinction becomes critical when conditions change, with Sheargold warning that some agents have been waiting for the market to suit the skills and strategies they already have.
When buyer activity slows, he said agents need to replace lost inquiry with deliberate outbound activity.
“If there’s less buyer activity, it means fundamentally you’re making fewer calls. So therefore replace those with the second function of the telephone; that’s the outgoing call.”
He also warned against writing off difficult listings before properly testing the opportunity, pointing to agents who achieved results by simply focusing on serving buyers.
Back to basics: The skills separating agents in a tougher market
As conditions become more challenging, Sheargold said agents needed to sharpen the fundamentals underpinning strong performance.
He identified objection handling, rapport building, understanding motivation and framing conversations as core selling skills that agents needed to master.
“The ability to build rapport with different kinds of people, helping understand someone’s motivation.”
He said that these skills become particularly important when agents can no longer rely on high levels of buyer activity or straightforward transactions to produce results.
To strengthen their skills, Sheargold recommended regular role-playing, with the process broken into smaller exercises to help agents build confidence.
“It’s called role-play, not ‘role serious’. That should be fun. Learn the words, forget the words.”
The goal, he said, was not to have agents recite scripts, but to understand the principles behind each conversation and apply them naturally.
He said that regular practice could also help agents handle objections and difficult conversations without becoming overly reliant on rehearsed responses, allowing them to listen and respond to the person in front of them.
Great leadership is learned
While agents can be proactive in upskilling, Sheargold said the ability to adapt cannot sit solely with individuals, with agency leaders playing a key role in helping their teams navigate changing conditions.
Sheargold said leadership was not simply a natural ability, with many of the skills needed to manage and motivate a team being learned and developed.
“You’ve got your natural born leader, and then you’ve got the learned leader.”
For Sheargold, effective leadership starts with understanding that different people require different forms of support, rather than applying the same approach across an entire team.
He said leaders needed to move away from simply communicating information and instead understand what individual team members need to perform at their best.
“Are you talking ‘at’ people, are you talking ‘to’ people, or are you talking ‘with’ people?”
Additionally, he said leaders could improve their connection to their team by understanding what success actually looks like for each person.
Sheargold said that asking “what does winning look like for you?” could help leaders understand what motivates each team member and where they need greater support or direction.
He also highlighted emotional intelligence as an important capability for leaders and agents, particularly when dealing with clients, colleagues and teams.
“If you’ve got a high EQ, it means that you’re tuning in.”
Build a high-performance culture from the inside out
Additionally, Sheargold said agencies needed to give team members a clear sense of purpose, helping them understand their role and contribution to the wider business rather than simply feeling like they were filling a position.
He said this was particularly important when building a shared vision, as employees needed to understand where the business was heading and how their own work contributed to that direction.
“If the vision isn’t big enough to hold the team, the team will exit.”
Sheargold said a strong culture should also shape how agencies responded to mistakes.
Rather than focusing on who was at fault, he encouraged leaders to understand what happened and where the process broke down.
“Most leaders, unfortunately, and also leaders of teams are saying, ‘Why did you do that?’ Wrong question to ask for a mistake. ‘How did this happen?’”
He said many mistakes ultimately came down to communication, particularly when responsibility passed between different parts of an agency.
“The vast majority of mistakes are communication mistakes.”
Lead today, shape tomorrow: AI, vision, and the future of the agency
While agencies needed to focus on the fundamentals required to perform today, Sheargold said leaders also had to prepare their businesses and teams for the future, including the growing role of AI.
He said AI could deliver practical benefits behind the scenes, from personalised communications and marketing to greater efficiency, but only when agencies had organised data and a single source of truth.
Sheargold said agencies should be cautious about adopting new technology simply because it was available, instead identifying the problem or opportunity each tool was intended to address.
Similarly, he said preparing for the future also required leaders to have a clear vision of where AI fitted in their agency and teams.
“The key to anything we do with AI, you have to move to a single source of truth.”
Sheargold will be speaking at The Business of Real Estate Conference on 8–9 September.
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