Ep. 43 - The Algorithm Is Lying to You: How Social Media Is Destroying Real Estate

In this episode of The Last Honest Realtor, host David Fleming confronts a reality nobody wants to admit: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok—they’re all lying to you about real estate. And it is reshaping what buyers and sellers expect in ways that no one is prepared for.

What starts with a rant about food photos on Instagram turns into a sharp, critical look at how social media has distorted the housing market. David dives into the rise of curated content, AI-polished listings, and the dangerous new standard of “scrollable perfection” that buyers now demand—and how all of it is quietly setting everyone up for failure.

In This Episode:

• Why social media is creating unrealistic expectations for buyers and sellers
• How algorithms, not agents, are misleading today’s real estate consumers
• Why perfect staging and Instagrammable marketing are backfiring
• How buyers have been conditioned to expect “12 out of 10” houses
• Why engagement metrics like showings and likes no longer equal demand

Timestamps:
00:00 – Social Media is Lying to You About Real Estate
05:00 – Why Real Estate Has Become a Sport (and an Addiction)
10:00 – How Algorithms Misprice Homes and Mislead Buyers
16:00 – The Rise of Scrollable Perfection and Unrealistic Standards
24:00 – Sellers Are Overstaging, Overpricing, and Overestimating
32:00 – Why Likes Don’t Equal Offers in 2025
38:00 – How to Focus on Fundamentals Instead of Fantasies

Also in This Episode:

• David explains how filters, AI, and real estate apps are setting buyers up for disappointment
• The hidden damage caused by HouseSigma, Instagram staging, and “perfect” listings
• Why honesty, substance, and brutal realism are the only things that will get deals done in 2025

Subscribe to The Last Honest Realtor on YouTube or your preferred podcast app. Drop a comment if you’ve ever been fooled by a too-good-to-be-true listing—or if you’re just fed up with the filters.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Social Media is Lying to You About Real Estate
• 5:00 Why Real Estate Has Become a Sport (and an Addiction)
• 10:00 How Algorithms Misprice Homes and Mislead Buyers
• 16:00 The Rise of Scrollable Perfection and Unrealistic Standards
• 24:00 Sellers Are Overstaging, Overpricing, and Overestimating
• 32:00 Why Likes Don’t Equal Offers in 2025
• 38:00 How to Focus on Fundamentals Instead of Fantasies

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Instagram is lying to you. So is YouTube. So is Facebook. So is TikTok, which I'm not on, but I've heard of it. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Last Honest Realtor. I'm your host, David Fleming. In all seriousness, yes, I'm familiar with TikTok. No, I will never be on it. I know what Snapchat is because I have nieces. But in a real estate context... All of these social media apps have changed the way that we look at real estate. And it has certainly changed buyer and seller expectations. Now, for those of you that have read my blog before, I'm going to go back to the well here. I don't understand people who take pictures of food and post on social media. I don't know. We all have our pet peeve. And for whatever reason, this is like the hill I'm going to die on. Now, maybe it's me doth protest too much. I don't have time to cook. I eat too fast. My wife will tell me that. But for the love of God, people that use the word plate as a verb, you know where I'm going with this? Oh, it's excellently plated. I've never understood people that take pictures of food and put it on Instagram. Now, this started years ago. And I started years ago on my blog making fun of it. You know, two girls out for lunch. Becky, do not start that salad before I get a photo of it for my gram. I actually remember going out once. For Valentine's Day dinner with my wife, we went to, I can't remember the name of the steak restaurant. It was in Yorkville and I didn't like it. The two girls next to us were standing on their chairs to get a great angle of their entrees with their upgraded iPhones because they probably buy the newest one every single time it comes out. Look, that's not me. But the point I want to make here is that what you see with that first photo of Becky's dinner on Instagram, is this perfected version of Becky's evening. What you don't see is that Becky then goes out and gets trashed at the club, stumbles home, and it could be Jimmy as well, okay? I don't wanna make this just about ladies. Jimmy goes home, he gets trashed at the club. Jimmy has a headache all night. He's completely dehydrated. He yaks a couple of times. He sleeps in, through his alarm, misses his gym class, and then... He's late for his grandmother's birthday. But it all started with that incredible photo Jimmy took of his pasta and put it on Instagram. Folks, excuse the long lead-in, but that's how I feel about real estate right now in the social media age. And again, I'm going to show my age here. I'm 44, by the way. But I was driving my daughter to school this morning, and she asked me randomly, Daddy, how did the word cemetery come to be? And I explained to her, well... You know, it probably came from some sort of different word in a different language. And she said, can you just Google it? I wanted to explain to her that I took Latin in high school and so many words stem from Latin. She said, just Google it. That's the world that we live in. And a more specific example for those of you that are my age, you might say something like, when I was a kid and I wanted to know what the Eiffel Tower looked like, I went to the library. I found a book. And then I opened it, and I looked, and I saw it. Now, just look it up on Google. So what social media has done to real estate, and there are so many amazing things it has done, of course, but it has set this expectation. And today's podcast is probably going to be called, because I love this idea, The Algorithm is Lying to You. This is Real Estate in the Age of Misinformation. And the algorithm itself, funnily enough, it's not a word, how, Sigma? It has an algorithm to tell you what the house is worth. And I've told people over and over, House Sigma can't tell if you have a house on Markham Street that happens to be on the east side of the street, well, it backs onto the houses on Bathurst. It doesn't know that. That gets a huge downtick. Does it know that it's next to an old hydro house? Does it know it's across the street from social housing? The algorithm, it's lying to you. But so too are all these social media apps that seek to perfect what we see. Every buyer wants value. And every seller wants top dollar. But in 2025, social media is quietly reshaping what both sides think those terms mean. Now, this episode isn't blaming TikTok or YouTube. It's about understanding how this curated content is setting the wrong expectations for what homes should look like, how deals should unfold, and what a good experience feels like. Now, I mentioned this idea of going to the library and taking out a book to see what the Eiffel Tower looks like. If you wanna draw this back in a real estate context, because now we just quickly go on one of our many apps, Once upon a time, you would walk into ye olde local brokerage and say, what listings do you have for sale? So say you don't like listing agents or buyer's agents or real estate in general. You can't imagine what it was like in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, actually trying to buy real estate. There was no cooperation. Every brokerage had their own listings, and that's why storefronts would put pictures of houses in the window. That is why. There's a little nugget you can tell your friends about when you're taking photos of your salad. But the point is, once you got past that first photo, you know what there was more of? Other photos, Polaroids specifically. Imagine your real estate agent came over to your home, they knocked on your door, they sat down in your living room, and they opened up a binder of Polaroids to show you a house. This house just came up, and then they showed you Polaroids. Well, of course, you can't imagine that. Now, literally from your phone, you have everything at your disposal. And that is what we're trying to talk about today, how that has changed. Now, change for the good, but with it comes a different perspective. Now, there is pressure to perform, and there is an unreal expectation loop. Every house nowadays seems like it came out of architectural digest. Now, again, if I go back, the origin of staging, for example, I got into the business in 2004. Staging was something that maybe 5% of agents were doing. And I wrote a blog about this early on in my career, I think 06, 07, where I talked about two houses, one that was staged and one that wasn't. Two agents in my office were laughing. They got multiple offers. They sold this house for a crazy price. It was probably like$400,000. And they were like, huh, well, they staged it. Just the word itself. You're like, wait, what does that mean? People didn't used to stage houses and now they do. So nowadays, and this is fast forward 21 years, every house seems staged. And even the bad staging is still better than what it looked like 21 years ago. So I have this idea that buyers will not accept anything less than perfection. I've seen it out there. I've worked with some of these buyers who look at photos and they go, I don't know why, because it's not staged. because it's not with a long-angle lens, wide-angle lens. It doesn't have the right color in the photos. We have set this expectation to be so unrealistic that buyers simply cannot look at anything that is not perfect. Now, I've often mused that in a red-hot market, buyers, they've got their top 10 list, but they'll settle for seven, seven out of 10 things, maybe eight out of 10 things. In a cool market, buyers want 12 out of 10 things. Buyers want beyond perfection. Now, some properties in a red-hot market look perfect. too good. So there's a question, can this actually backfire? Imagine that a listing comes out and it's at$9.99 and you've got a one-two budget. And you look at this and you go, there's no way I can afford this. This is going to go way over. You don't see it. I'm just saying, yes, we should still stage. Yes, we should still do all the right things. But there is this idea that in this pursuit of perfection, when you make it so unrealistic, you're almost making it unattainable in the eyes or the minds of the buyers. Now, every real estate sale has to feel like a win, even if it means waiting too long or overpaying. And I have often mused that real estate in Toronto has become a sport. It's got winners and losers. At least that's what I tell my daughter. We don't keep score in gym class. Well, you should, honey, because the real world has winners and losers. No, seriously, real estate has winners and losers. Real estate has become a sport. Real estate has become an addiction. Every Torontonian wants to discuss real estate. Now, how Sigma and other apps have made people fans of real estate? Yeah. In fact, I have a Hours and hours every single week just looking at real estate, favoriting things, making lists. It's become a sport. It's become a hobby. Now, years ago, we used to joke about the mother-daughter duo that would go to open houses to get design ideas. They're not really in the market. They would come in. They're like, listen, we're not really looking to buy. We just want to peruse. Oh, this is great wallpaper. Where'd they get this? I mean, that was then. Now, I have clients that come to me and they want to start a search and they send me a link to a Google Drive. And it has 30 photos of kitchens they like. It has MLS numbers in spreadsheets. This is what House Sigma has done, House Sigma and other apps and MLS and Realm and all the wonderful things. And while it's amazing because it's really empowered the consumer, again, it's set this unrealistic expectation. Now, I mentioned that House Sigma has made people fans of real estate. So too has social media. And that is both good and bad. So I sold a house earlier this year. I did not sell it to them in 2021. but they paid a huge amount and they took a huge loss. A real estate agent put this out on social media and said something like, I can't remember, some euphemism like, you know, go get your soap because these sellers took a bath, like something ridiculous like that, and then said, here's what they paid, here's what they sold for, here's their land transfer tax, their real estate fees, and then highlighted their loss. I think that is so incredibly tacky and I think it's rude. Now, don't get me wrong. I write on Toronto Realty Blog, as I've been doing since 2007, and I will talk about wins, losses, bad business practices, bad photos. But I have always adhered to what I perceive are still the rules. You do not give out addresses. It's that simple. And when I put things in my blog, I will black out the address. I'll black out the intersection. And this person didn't do that. And I filed a complaint. with Ricoh because I thought it was really tacky. Now, I haven't heard back from that, but one thing I did hear back from years ago, and this was, I think, in 2021, 2022, I had clients that bought a house and there were 22 offers on this house. So my clients got it. So they're either the smartest people in the world because they pegged the price or they're the dumbest people because they outbid 21 other people. It's the market. And another real estate agent put the address up there, put photos up there on Twitter and said, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. These people have buried themselves. They'll never get their money out. What a joke, blah, blah, and blah. And I filed a complaint with Rico. And I basically said, listen, I have been playing by the rules my entire career. If you tell me that this is okay, great. I'll play by those rules too. And I did hear that that agent ended up having to take a course, right? That's what happened. And I saw the agent's response and he or she was like, I'm really into numbers. And I was analyzing. It's like, no, you weren't. You were trying to get fans on social media. And that's the point I'm trying to make is that real estate has become this sport and it's become this thing that has fans. And real estate agents, for good or for bad, are trying to create content and talk about it. But Are you allowed to do that? In these respects, no, obviously not, and it didn't really stop those two particular agents from doing so. Now, how do agents and brokerages add to the noise with their overly polished marketing that masks flaws and inflates confidence? Well, I would say that AI enables people that cannot read, write, speak, or spell to come up with unbelievable listing descriptions. You know, there's a couple of agents, and I'll just name names. Alex Broad, there. People refer to Alex Brott as like an adjective. Oh, well, it's an Alex Brott type listing, right? Like a descriptor, right? Or Fox Marin, for example, right? Like, and there's all kinds of these agents like, you know, Paul Johnson, right? He always has these incredible listings, right? His thing is unique urban homes. Oh, wow. Talking about these agents. I'm getting really riled up here. Even holding my pen. But, you know, Alex Brott is somebody that people always refer to like the way that she writes her listing description, right? And now you have AI that can do it for you. And I remember an agent once said to me, oh, you just wait until AI, you can speak to it and say, write me a thousand words in the narrative of David Fleming's Toronto Realty blog. And I was like, are you kidding? That's something that can happen? So if you were to tell AI, write me a description like Alex Broad, write me a description like Paul Johnson, write me a description like Ralph and Corey. Well, what if it did that? Now, I'm gonna go on record saying, and I have no basis, I haven't studied it, I don't think AI is that good. In fact, and this is a tangent here, I once wrote a blog. Gosh, I can't remember what it was about. Not important, but in my blogs, I write these introductions, and this particular one happened to be about Terminator. Oh, that's what it was. It was about Terminator listings, and I wrote this long introduction about me and my buddy, 1992. We got a laser disc player watching Terminator 2, and so a couple of the blog readers said, I asked AI to talk about terminated listings in the real estate market and the movie Terminator, and this is what they wrote. And a bunch of readers posted it, and it was absolute nonsense and jargon. So excuse the tangent there. I hope I didn't lose you. My point is, I think in the context of real estate listings and write-ups, there's an opportunity for some agents that have absolutely no idea what to put on the listing to do a heck of a lot better. Now, how do agents and brokerages add to the noise with overly polished marketing that masks flaws and inflates content? The first thing I would think about is AI writing for you. Now, I'm a writer. I love writing. I started Toronto Realty Blog in 2007. Creative writing has always been a hobby of mine. I'm a nerd. During the pandemic, I literally wrote a 200-page book about collecting sports cards. Yeah, seriously. So I love writing. And I really am proud of the things that we produce and we put on MLS. And I think there's a lot of other real estate agents out there. For example, people will say, oh, I love the way Alex Brott writes her MLS listings. Or, you know, Fox Marin, for example, or Paul Johnson. There's lots of agents that do a really exceptional job. But what if an agent that can't read, write, or spell all of a sudden used AI to do that for them? Now, I don't believe that AI can really copy that voice. I think that you can always kind of tell when it's AI generated. But... It's going to get better over time. And maybe the advantage that some of the agents that I just mentioned or somebody like me who's passionate about writing have will fall by the wayside as AI gets better and you can just say, hey, write me 600 words about this house and this location for my MLS listing. So, you know, we talk about the polished marketing that masks flaws. Another thing I would say is filters as far as social media goes, as far as these apps go. And I'm thinking about, I don't know, when my niece takes a picture of me and turns it into a woman or when my daughter and son are talking to me on FaceTime and all of a sudden, now I'm a monkey and now I'm a fish. I don't actually know what those are, but I'm thinking about the filters. I'm thinking about how we could change the way that properties look by polishing them to something that is so incredibly unrealistic that what? Disappoints buyers. See where I'm going with this? So I mentioned a few minutes ago that if you set the bar too high, you might push people away. By the same token, if you set the expectation and the excitement so high, what happens when they get inside and it doesn't meet it? That is what we call the bait and switch. Now, an example of this before AI, before filters, would be simply taking a photo and stretching it. You can do that in paint. What about a wide angle lens? And I would always say, if you look at a fridge, you know what a standard fridge looks like and then an extra wide fridge? When you see the extra wide fridge and then in the background, there's a coffee cup that instead of being two inches is like eight inches, you're like, okay, they stretch that photo. But we see this all the time. And then you walk into the house, you're like, wait a minute, this room is half as big as it looks on MLS. You are setting yourself up for failure. And I see agents and sellers doing this all the time. Now, the other thing that I noted here is The amount of photos of stuff and things, kitchen, living, dining, throw pillows, bedroom, bathroom, jar of willows. There are so many photos on MLS that are just of design. Does that help or hinder? My first condo, I staged it myself because this was, I don't know, 2010, I think. And I went out and bought like this glass jar of sticks or willows or whatever. And then in my new condo, I was like, well, I might as well bring this. My first buddy that shows up, he goes, yo, Dave, where'd you get the jar of sticks? But now it's everywhere. And now there's photos of it. So it's one thing to have staging items and accessories. And we do this with regularity. That's what stagers do. They put all of this polish in there. It's another thing entirely to have dedicated photos on MLS of a stack of books, dedicated photos of a set of throw pillows. And when we look at listings, and we have so many of these photos, we start to lose sight of the fact that this is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom semi-detached on a 20 by 100 foot lot with one car lane parking. We're looking at throw pillows. Now, there are buyers unfortunately, that have seen way too much. And smart buyers enter the market, but they've been conditioned by months of this what we call scrollable perfection. So again, think of the jar of sticks. Think of the throw pillows. Think of the books. All you see is perfection. Their expectations are absolutely through the roof. Then what happens is nobody wants to do any work on a house. So here's an example. I have an off-market listing, or I should say I had. We sold it. It went to market and went through the process. But before we were going to market, a colleague of mine said, oh, my clients would be interested in that. So I took my colleague through, and she took photos and sent them to the buyers. Now, these are photos on an iPhone, so they're not polished. They're not through a photographer's eye. And these are photos of an unstaged house. You know what the buyer said? Doesn't look like it's for us. Are you kidding? This is exactly what you want. The right beds, the right baths, the right street, the right location. It has parking. It's all those things. You know what I think? I think they saw that the house has carpets. Oh, God. We can't change that. Oh, no, wait. You actually can. Yeah, you know what you can do? You can remove them and then put in hardwood. But the buyers didn't want to do that. In fact, they didn't even want to look at the house. I was so passionate, I took my glasses off. So this is what I mean by buyers being conditioned by scrollable perfection. They got these photos. They weren't through the lens of a photographer's camera. And they weren't of a fully polished, perfect place. Not only that, they couldn't get past broad loom. They had to see carpet. They probably would have settled for a really crappy laminate from Home Depot when this broad loom was actually four times as much as said laminate. Now, what do buyers expect? They expect turnkey homes, they expect major deals, and they expect frictionless service. As I said, buyers want 12 out of 10 things. Their expectations are through the roof. And now that we're starting to see this market where, hey, wait a minute, some properties aren't selling on offer nights, some things are falling through the cracks. You know what you get? You get my colleague I just talked to who listed a property for$1,150,000. Four days in, she gets an offer. She says to me, oh, it's bad. I said, oh, it's bad.$1,070,000? She said, take off$100,000. I said, you're joking. She got an offer of$970,000 on a$1,150,000 listing that's been on the market for four days. I want to say congratulations to that buyer for trying something, but that's just stupidity. There's deals out there. Don't get me wrong. But this unrealistic expectation is based on what? Again, it's based on social media. The market's bad. We're in a recession. Donald Trump and tariffs. So it cuts both ways. It's not just about the way that these things look. It's about this idea that, hey, maybe we could get a deal out there. Okay, you know what? This property, it's at$115,000. The comp was$118,000,$119,000. And this property has no offer date. And instead of being like, that's really interesting. Okay, I can get a deal. I don't have to bid against other people. Maybe I get it for 112. Oh, no, 970. Now, what the market delivers, compromises, nuance, and negotiation. And within all that, you have to be realistic. It's in everything that I've just said. It's in every podcast and every blog I've written. And a lot of people aren't being realistic. Now, not just on the buy side, that person offering 970 on 115. on the sell side too. And there are so many stories of sellers that are overpricing, listing agents that go along for the ride, that that is an entirely different blog. I have also written multiple blogs and podcasts and done videos and spoken about the agents out there. I was with Chris the other night. We were reviewing offers on a listing and we were talking about the two agents and how bad they were at their jobs. I'm sorry, that's so rude. I get it, but just work with me here. My phone buzzes and it's my friend Amy from another brokerage. And she texts me, you would not believe the agent I'm dealing with tonight. It's an epidemic, a pandemic. Ooh, no one wants to go back there. And I'm serious. All of these agents who got licensed in 2020, 2021, 2022, the market was ripping. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing now. And more to the point, they don't know how to communicate. And we will go back to that in a minute. Now on the seller side, Overconfident, overcurated, and we have talked about this. Sellers think their homes should perform because it looks like the homes they see online. But they don't see what we see, and they overstress the positives, and they shoo away the negatives. Now, picture the seller that tells you about a particular feature, and your response is, hmm, cool. But then they go on and on and on about it. Now, on the flip side of that is you point something out, oh, hey, what about this? They go, yeah, don't worry about that. That's the conversation that we're having. So... I visited a house not too long ago, met with the sellers. I thought it was not quite as good as they thought it was. We didn't quite agree on the price. And then we went down to the basement, and the floor was like, how do I say this, sinking into the core of the earth. And they were like, ah, it's not a big deal. We'll throw a rug over it. This is a Victorian home. This is built in like 1890, and there's about a 12-inch gap between the baseboard and where the slab has fallen into. And they're like, we'll throw a rug over it. So I can't unsee that. I would need to disclose that, which we disagreed on. Oh, in an unrelated story, I'm not the listing agent for that. But Victorian home sinking into the core of the earth on a long enough time horizon will be molten lava. And they just shoot it away. Dropped my pen again. So this is what I mean. You're overstressing the positives and you're just shooing away the negatives. It's tunnel vision, if you will. Now, beautiful staging doesn't guarantee strong offers. It depends on the volume in the market. So if you've got a great house and you've staged to perfection, you've got that one buyer for it. But what if there are 30 other houses that are beautiful and staged to perfection and you still have that one buyer? It's simple numbers. It's supply and demand. And while I will be the first person to talk about all the wonderful things that we do to get a property ready for sale, you still have to monitor the numbers. And I'm a data nerd. So there are a lot of listings where, and I know in advance, we might have an issue. This is one of the things I'm gonna talk about later, setting your clients up for success by actually telling them what's happening. A lot of listings where I will share a Google Excel sheet and I will continue to update with all of the sales in the area so that the sellers understand what's happening. It's simply about volume. Now, once upon a time, staging alone brought in buyers and offers, but what if the entire industry stepped up its game? For example, I'll be the first person to talk about all the wonderful things we do and how we stage, but not all staging is the same. You've seen bad staging. It's sparse. It's minimalist. There's no accessories. The frames of the pictures don't match. The color schemes are off. The couch doesn't fit the space. But I'll do you one better. What if every single property is staged to perfection by the same stager and it's all A plus, but you only have one buyer? It's just about numbers. And the point I'm making here is, and I will make shortly, is that I will, when I identify what could be a soft market and problem listing, prepare my sellers by putting together a Google sheet that tracks all of the properties that are competing and what's selling and what's not so that they understand what's happening in the market. Take every property, stage it to the nines, make it absolutely perfect, and that's wonderful. But if there aren't the same number of buyers for the number of properties, it's just simple math. It's simple supply and demand. Now, let's talk about how social media-fueled pricing fantasies are setting sellers up for failure. Now, you know that saying you're five times more likely to provide a negative review than if you have a positive experience? Yes. So then, when it comes to real estate, I would say you're far more likely to hear about that incredible house that got 20 offers and sold for 140% a list than the 15 houses that got zero offers on their scheduled offer night. And I'm the nerd that tracks that. I see how many houses out there are failing on offer nights, but the sellers see what they wanna see. They will all talk about that one property that did exceptionally well and they'll get that tunnel vision and they'll forget about everything else. Now there is a disparity problem in the market. Buyers think that homes are overpriced because they don't feel like what they saw online. And here's where we talk about either overstaging or we talk about that bait and switch. What you present out there on social media has to reflect what the buyer's going to see when they walk inside. And so whether it's using superlatives on social media or in your MLS description, or whether it's just filtering the heck out of this, it has to represent the property when the buyer walks in. That's what I mean by the bait and switch. You do not want it to look too good. Filters, editing tricks, wide angle lenses, you're setting buyers up for disappointment. Now, sellers, they think they're underappreciated because these likes aren't translating into offers. And to that, I would say blame agents for not being honest and open from the onset. So as I mentioned, I will have a phone call with my clients before I list. Weeks in advance, I might put together a shared Google sheet with every property that's coming out. And so say I list on a Tuesday. Folks, let's talk on Monday night. We'll set expectations. We're coming out on Tuesday. First day of the listing, I'd like to see four to five showings booked. Second day listing, it's usually a pretty big day. I'd like to see six to eight showings booked. Now the next day we'll see another five to six. Things will taper off before the weekend. I'll get back to you about the number of people through the open house. Set the expectations accordingly. And then if on that first day you have zero showings and on the second day you have two, well, you can explain that you're performing below average. And what I would say to that with a caveat is that once upon a time you could rely on the number of showings as a representation of the number of offers. And I wrote a blog on this. I think it was in 2021. I took a bunch of listings we had with the number of showings and the number of requests for the home inspection for houses, the status certificate for condos, and then looked at the percentage. We had 80 showings. We had eight offers. Okay, great. We can work with that, right? 10%. That's a good number. Next property, we had 40 showings. We had four offers. Hey, it's 10% again. Let's find that pattern. All that is out the window right now. And that's what I mean when it comes to these sellers. The likes aren't translating into the offers. So they get the showings, but the agent doesn't follow up for feedback. They have people through the open house, but you're not really conveying to them that, hey, Mr. Seller, we did have 40 people come through the open house, but every single one of these people were young. They were frustrated. They think the market's terrible and they all own condos and they talk about how they're underwater and they can't afford your house. This is what is missing. It's not just a numbers game anymore. So let's now tie this all together. Let's talk about what's actually selling and why. And of course, we're looking at properties that are perfect. We're looking through the eyes of a buyer that seeks perfection. Some of them are, some of them aren't. But what is actually selling and why? I come back to the agents. I know I've made this point before, and I know that a lot of people don't see the value in an agent, or they think a property sells itself, but I am telling you right now, the A properties, they're probably gonna sell regardless, maybe for more, maybe for less, but the Bs aren't moving, and the Cs and Ds have absolutely no chance. And I've mentioned multiple times in this podcast and through the last couple of blogs that I've written, the agents. It is the agents, the people that absolutely do not know how to communicate, do not know how to sell real estate. Now, one of the very important things when I talk about communicating is communicating with your own clients, setting realistic expectations off the hop, and not just going along for the ride. So you have a property that's worth a million dollars. The seller says, I want to list for a million too. Are you taking that listing? I'm not. I don't have a magic wand. So there are a lot of agents out there that are just taking any listing. They're not doing their analysis. They're hoping the market sells it. Blind faith? I don't know. But that's not a listing that should be on the market, and it's going to continue to sit. And it eventually becomes what? A statistic. Now, substance and strategy is still going to outperform showmanship. We stage all of our listings. We have properties where we spend weeks upgrading them. We have a property right now where we're putting new countertops in the kitchen today because the counters are 20 years old. It's a great house. It's a great location. But again, the buyers, oh, I don't know. I like the house. But look at those laminate countertops. So we know what needs to be done, but it's not just that. The substance and strategy is more important than the showmanship. So we have the knowledge, and we have the context, and we have the wherewithal. The seller, of course, has the budget and the trust in us to replace countertops, put in a new sink, paint the kitchen cabinets, re-sand the floors. But at the end of the day, the art of the deal and knowing how to talk to people is what is going to actually get a deal done. Agents are blowing deals left, right, and center right now. Now, experienced agents are retraining clients to trust facts over filters. We can do all the amazing things to the property, but we've got to be realistic on price. We can have a weekend open house, but we have to understand that it's not going to be well attended. Or a better example is, to be perfectly honest, if I had a condo listing on the 40th floor of building XYZ and the seller was like, hey, open houses are allowed in the building. We should do one. I'm going to be honest and say, why? I can be honest. And I feel like a lot of agents out there can't be. And look, I've been in this for 21 years. I'm blessed. I have a really loyal clientele. They trust me. I feel for the agents out there that feel like I can't stand up to this client. I can't tell them what's really happening. They need the deal. But they're not going to get the deal in the end because they can't be honest enough with the seller. Now, buyer agents who know how to work and guide buyers are probably going to seek out listing agents that know how to work and guide sellers. It's a perfect fit. So if I've got a buyer and I'm looking at a house or three houses, I'm going to look at who the agent is. There are so many agents out there that are unrealistic about price. I've said this in a previous podcast, agents saying, don't bother. Don't bring me that offer. A colleague was telling me, okay, the condo market is not great. We know that. Yeah, great. Colleague was telling me she had a client that really liked this unit and It was on the market for five days. They went in 10 grand on her list. I would literally lay down and let you sign that offer on my back. The listing agent started yelling at her. Wow, how could you do this? We're brand new on the market. They didn't even sign it back. What are you doing? And you know what? She sold her client something else. That property will sit and sit and sit. That is so incredibly misguided. Now, some buyers are either being restrained by their agents or restraining themselves. And listen... If there's a red hot property and it's underpriced, it's a rarity, or it's a forever home, I use the example of Hogarth in Riverdale.$4 million list gets seven offers, so if it's 650,000 over, sure, there are those. But if you've got a 699 list and there's one competing offer, yeah, okay, you go in at 720, 725. The agent comes back and he's barking, well, you know, the comp sold two years ago for 820. And you're like, okay, listen, It's 2025. I check my watch. It's April. We're not in that market. Buyers are being restrained. The agents are restraining them, and they're being realistic on both sides. Now, my advice for 2025. Let me put this all together. Be visual, but be honest. You need more than just staging. Speak to the functionality, the lifestyle, the area amenities, and are you ready for this? The boring things. like how the house is updated. We have a brand new furnace. It's a$15,000 value. We have a brand new air conditioner. It's$7,500. We don't rent our hot water tank. All these windows are from 2022. No one cares about that. But you know what? In this market, they do. Because when the market's absolutely ripping, all that matters are those throw pillows, the jar of sticks that David had in his first condo. That's absolutely all that matters. In this market right now, the things you need to stress, the functionality, things like the daycare. No, I'm serious. Things like the Freshco that's 100 meters away. There's an infinite number of things that you can stress with a property and you only have 1,000 characters on MLS for the little write-up. What I'm saying is it's not just about the throw pillows anymore. It's not just about staging, the filters, the polish, the Instagram reel, the YouTube video. Talk to me about the$35,000 that the sellers put into this house to dig up the basement floor and take out the clay pipe, to remove the cast iron stack, to put in a sump pump, all of the unsexy things. I think this is so incredibly important. And this is one of the things I'm talking to my sellers about. I'm still staging it. I'm still putting in new countertops. I'm still doing all those wonderful things. But let's convey to the buyer pool who's got a budget and who's nervous, this thing is not going to be Tom Hanks' money pit. 1986, Shelley Long. I haven't seen that in a while. Now, don't mistake engagement for demand. I mentioned this earlier. The number of showings... I don't want to say it doesn't matter anymore, but it's not going to directly correlate like it used to. The number of requests for the home inspection, the number of requests for the status certificate. A lot of agents aren't even ordering the status certificate in advance of their listings anymore because they expect the condo to take three months to sell. The status is stale dated after 30 days. These metrics that we used to have, I don't think that we can use engagement metrics as any sort of indicator of demand anymore because you have to do what? What's that thing you have to do as a listing agent? Solicit feedback. You have to call and ask. Somebody books a showing, you're like, they love it, right? Look at the market out there. It's red hot. No, no, that was then. This is now. Pick up the phone, call them. And you know what you do when you pick up the phone and you call somebody who says that their client unfortunately isn't interested? You talk about the market. You talk about what's out there. I spoke to an agent today. She called me for feedback. When I showed her property, we got to talking. She's bringing out a property in two weeks time that is absolutely positively perfect for my clients and she's going to get me in a week earlier. That's what we do. We communicate. Now, focus on the market fundamentals, not on fantasies. This goes back to price and expectations. So a lot of agents, when the market was absolutely ripping, they would do no research whatsoever. Client would say, well, we're really looking to get 1.3. And they'd be like, yeah, okay. You know, let's put it at$9.99. We've got our offer date and we'll, you know, go down on it. You can't do that anymore. Is it worth 1.3? Well, let me do my actual, what is it, that thing, job and put together a comparable price. Market analysis. Comparative market analysis. Let me do my job. Let me show you what I think. And I was in a house a couple weeks ago. Seller wanted 1.6 million. I valued it at 1.35. I was honest. There's probably 20 other agents out there that have the paperwork ready at 1.6. But to what end? Three price reductions later and eventually they'll sell it in September. That's not the way that I do business. I think you need to focus on these fundamentals, not the fantasies. You need to go back to basics. You need to look at the numbers, look at the data, and tell people what their properties are actually worth. So in summary, folks, who takes pictures of their food and puts it on Instagram? No, I'm kidding. But that really is the best example I can think of. It's a microcosm for what's happening in the real estate market or what has happened over the last little while. It doesn't show you what's actually going on in the background. And that silly story I told about what happens after the photo of your salad. What was the rest of your day like? What was the rest of your night like? I hope it was a lot better than Jimmy that I described in the introduction. So in summary, folks, I think we can agree the most important part of the last half hour is the question, why do people take photos of food and put it on Instagram? No, I'm kidding. I would say this. For buyers, for sellers, for agents, for buyers, it's okay to want something beautiful. Do not let Instagram aesthetics and social media blind you to these smart opportunities out there. Do not let them dissuade you from the reality of what's happening in the market and with individual properties. For the sellers, likes do not equal offers. You need to look past the great job that you've done on the home and the great job that your agent has done preparing it for sale and focus on pricing right and marketing honestly. not just impressively. And to the agents, stop trying to win the algorithm. Stop trying to battle the other side. It's not a fight. If I extended my hand outward to you like this, would you take it and shake it? That's actually something I said to an agent the other day. It takes two to make a deal. And you have to remember, the entire purpose of listing real estate is to sell it. It is not to pick a fight with the other side. Being right and not getting the deal done does not get you anywhere. And at the end of the day, you're really not working on the best interests of your clients if you're putting your ego ahead of getting a deal done. You need to educate your clients. You need to bridge the gap between expectation and reality. Folks, thank you so much for watching, as always, on YouTube. Feel free to drop us a comment. And honestly, I do want to hear from you on this. Give me an example. And we used to do a feature on Toronto Realty Blog called More MLS Musings, which was just ridiculous photos in MLS. If you are willing, if you have an example, email it to me. I want to know what you think is good marketing. I want to know what you think is bad marketing. Or drop it in the comments section. Please remember to like, comment, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Apple Music. And we'll see you next time here on The Last Honest Realtor.