A buddy of mine ran an open house in Walnut Creek last Sunday. Beautiful home, priced well, great staging, plenty of foot traffic. By Monday morning, he had a stack of business cards, an empty cheese plate, and zero offers.

He texted me: “What am I doing wrong?”

Nothing. He’s doing nothing wrong. He’s just hunting in the wrong forest. And he doesn’t know it yet.

Let me show you what I mean.

What the data is actually telling us

I’m going to spare you the doom-and-gloom housing market recap you’ve already read three times this week. Instead, let’s look at the numbers that matter for what you’re going to do on Monday morning.

Nationally: Existing home sales rose just 0.2% in April to a 4.02 million annualized rate, with the median price at $417,700 — up only 0.9% year-over-year. The 30-year fixed mortgage averaged 6.33% in April, according to NAR’s April release. Not great. Not catastrophic. Just stuck.

California: C.A.R. reported March home sales fell 3.5% from February and 2.5% year-over-year — the third straight month of annual declines. Statewide sales have remained below the 300,000 annualized benchmark for the 42nd consecutive month. Forty-two months. That’s three and a half years of “slow.” At what point do we stop calling it slow and just call it the market?

Right here in the East Bay: Alameda County’s median is $1,360,000, down 1.4% from a year ago, with sales dropping 7.7% year-over-year. Contra Costa came in at $870,000, down 4.1% year-over-year, with sales essentially flat. Homes are still moving fast when they do move — median time on market is 12 days in Alameda, 13 in Contra Costa — but there are fewer of them happening overall.

Now here’s the part nobody is telling you on the coaching calls.

The customer changed and most agents are still chasing yesterday’s buyer

Pull up NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Look at who is actually buying a house right now in America:

First-time home buyers have collapsed to just 21% of all buyers — the lowest share since NAR began tracking this number in 1981. Before the Great Recession, it was the norm for 40% of buyers to be first-timers. That means 79% of today’s buyers are repeat buyers.

The median age of the repeat buyer? Sixty-two years old. In 1981, it was 36. The age of repeat buyers has hit an all-time high.

And those sellers? They’ve now owned their home for a median of 11 years before selling — also an all-time high. The lock-in effect of low-interest-rate mortgages is playing a role: if a homeowner lacks a motivating factor to move, they may stay put longer.

Read that again. The customer is not a stressed-out 31-year-old refreshing Zillow at 2 a.m. The customer is somebody’s parent. The customer remembers what gas cost in 1985. The customer has equity coming out of their ears and is trying to decide whether to downsize, help their kids buy, move closer to the grandkids, or stay put another five years.

That customer is not on your Instagram. That customer is not clicking your Facebook ad.

That customer is somebody’s referral. According to NAR, 88% of buyers used an agent or broker — and buyers and sellers were happy with their agent and would recommend or use them again. The relationship is doing the work. Always has, always will. FSBO sales dropped to a historic low of just 5% — and 60% of those FSBOs already knew the buyer. Translation: even the people trying to skip the agent are leaning on their personal network.

This entire market is running on relationships. And too many agents are spending their money pretending it isn’t.

So why are agents still fishing where the fish aren’t?

I’ll tell you why. Because somebody told them in 2022 that they could buy leads, run ads, and grow a real estate business from a laptop. And in 2022, with rates at 3% and everybody and their dog refinancing, that almost worked. The market was so hot it covered for a lot of bad habits.

That market is gone. It’s been gone for 42 months. The agents who built their entire business model on Zillow leads and Facebook funnels are the ones running open houses with empty cheese plates and full sign-in sheets that go nowhere.

Meanwhile, the agents in your office who quietly close 18 to 30 sides a year? Go ask them where their business comes from. I guarantee you the answer is not “Facebook.” It’s their database. It’s the family they sold a house to in 2009 who is now downsizing. It’s the client whose daughter just got engaged and needs a starter condo. It’s the widow from 2018 whose financial advisor told her to sell the big house and they immediately called the agent who sent her a card every Thanksgiving for the last seven years.

Two questions for Monday morning

Stop reading market recap blogs. Stop watching another YouTube guru tell you about “the 7 secrets of slow markets.” Sit down at your kitchen table with a cup of coffee and answer these two questions honestly:

1. Who in your existing database is likely to move in the next 12 to 18 months — and when did you last have a real conversation with them?

Not a market update email blast. Not a holiday card. A real, human, “how are you actually doing” conversation. Look at the people in your database who are 60+. The empty nesters. The ones in 4-bedroom houses they don’t need anymore. The ones who have mentioned grandkids in another state. The ones who are about to retire. You know 25 to 50 of them right now. When was the last time you called one of them?

2. How are you adding 5 to 10 new people every month who fit that same profile?

Not “leads.” People. Real human beings whose life circumstances suggest they’ll move in the next 18 to 36 months. The neighbor who just had their second kid. The colleague whose mom is moving in with them. The friend of a friend who just got transferred. The person you met at your kid’s soccer game who mentioned they’re inheriting their parents’ Pleasant Hill house.

Both of those questions are work. Real work. The kind that doesn’t scale. The kind that doesn’t have a software solution. The kind that won the business for the agents who are eating right now and that will keep winning for the next decade no matter what the market does.

A quick story from 1986

When I started in this business in 1986, I knew nobody in my market. I had no sphere. The market wasn’t great — interest rates were over 10% and most of my friends were laughing at me for getting into real estate at all.

What I did have was a system. I worked expired listings and FSBOs across the entire county every single day. I called. I knocked. I showed up. I had no leads-buying budget because there were no leads to buy. Within six months, I was in the top 10% of my office. Not because I was smarter than anyone else. Because I did the work that other people wouldn’t.

You have something I didn’t have in 1986. You already have a database. You have past clients. You have a sphere of influence whether you treat it like one or not. The work is right there. You just have to do it.

Finish strong

The market isn’t going to bail you out this year. C.A.R. is forecasting California home sales to inch up about 2% in 2026. That’s not a rising tide. That’s a flat lake. The agents who win this year will win because they did the work, not because the market gave it to them.

So here’s my challenge: Pick 25 people out of your database this week. Real people, not leads. People you know. People who trust you. Call them. Not to pitch them. Not to “check in on the market.” Just call them like a human being calls another human being. Ask how they’re doing. Listen.

Then do it again next week with 25 more.

Do that for 90 days and tell me your business hasn’t changed.

I urge you to stop hunting in the wrong forest. The customer the market is sending you is the one you already know. Go talk to them.