The Four Words That Cost Me an $11,000 Commission Check

1. A seller's kitchen. I had just finished my listing presentation. Printed comps. Color photos of my last three sales. The whole thing went beautifully. The husband nodded along. The wife smiled at the right moments. I walked out of there absolutely certain I had the listing.

Two days later, the wife called.

"Dale, we talked it over," she said. "And we've decided to try selling it ourselves first."

Four words I had no answer for: *try selling it ourselves.*

I stammered something about exposure and negotiations and legal liability. It was weak. I could hear myself being weak while the words were coming out of my mouth. She thanked me for my time and hung up. I sat in my car in their driveway for a full minute before I started the engine.

The commission on that house would have been about eleven thousand dollars. They sold it themselves four months later, for seventeen thousand less than I would have priced it. I know because I looked it up on the MLS the morning it closed, which was a special kind of self-torture I do not recommend.

Here's what I didn't understand back then: objections don't ambush you because you're a bad agent. They ambush you because you're a tired agent. You're running on three hours of sleep and a gas station breakfast sandwich, and someone hits you with a question your brain has to answer from scratch, in real time, while they stare at you across a kitchen island. That's not a fair fight.

The agents who handle objections well aren't quicker on their feet than you. They just showed up with the answers already loaded. And now, my friend, you've got something they didn't have in 2007: a junior assistant who will build your objection responses while you're sleeping.

The Prompt

This prompt takes the specific property or situation you're walking into and generates the objections you're most likely to hear, with response scripts that sound like you, not like a compliance manual.

You are helping me prepare for a real estate conversation. I am a residential agent and I need to anticipate objections before I walk into the room.

Here is the situation:
- I am meeting with: [a seller considering FSBO / a buyer nervous about interest rates / a seller who thinks they should wait until spring / a buyer who had a bad experience with their last agent]
- Property details (if relevant): [address, price point, days on market if listed, any known issues]
- My specific concern: [what objection are you most worried about hearing?]

For this situation, generate:

1. The top 5 objections I am most likely to hear, ranked by how often they actually come up
2. For each objection, write a 2-3 sentence response that:
   - Validates their concern without agreeing with it ("I hear you on that" is fine; "You're absolutely right" is not)
   - Gives one specific fact, number, or story that addresses the concern directly
   - Ends by redirecting to the decision that actually matters
3. A version of each response that works if I only have 10 seconds to answer (text message, brief phone call, or conversation where they're clearly in a hurry)

Tone rules:
- Sound like a veteran agent who has heard everything and isn't rattled
- Never defensive. Never desperate. Never corporate.
- If a fact or stat would help, give me the real number, not a vague range

How to Customize This

You don't need to run this prompt fresh for every conversation. Run it once for your most common situations. For me, that's the FSBO objection, the "we want to think about it" objection, and the "our neighbor's cousin is an agent" objection. Save the responses somewhere you can glance at before a listing appointment or a buyer consult. Not to read them word for word. Just to have the bones in your head so when the moment comes, your brain grabs something solid instead of stammering.

The prompt works best when you're specific. "A buyer nervous about interest rates" gives you generic advice. "A buyer nervous about the 6.8 percent rate on a $420,000 property in a neighborhood where homes are selling in 11 days" gives you ammunition.

The agent who took that listing from me in 2007 wasn't better than me. She just had an answer when I didn't. Don't let that be you.

Try this tonight on your three most common objections. Pull up ChatGPT, paste the prompt, fill in the blanks, and keep the responses somewhere you'll see them tomorrow morning. Ten minutes. That's it. It beats sitting in a stranger's driveway with nothing to say.