A year and a half into showing homes to the same couple, I started to wonder whether I just wasn’t closing well enough.

That was how we were trained back then. You worked to close. If a buyer didn’t buy, the gap was your technique, and the fix was a better answer to the objection.

I had met them while sitting a new construction condo project in Tucson. They were an older couple who had spent about five years traveling in their RV and had come back to be close to their grandchildren. It was a buyer’s market. There was no shortage of homes.

So we looked. Middle of the day, evenings, weekends — whenever something came up, I scheduled it and met them there. Every showing went the same way. Excitement over the listing. More excitement on the walk-through. Then a problem they couldn’t get past, and we were back where we started. That went on for a little over a year.

Going into the second year, I kept doing exactly what I had been doing. Answer the phone, schedule the showing, meet them at whatever time they chose. The one thing I changed: after every house, I wrote down what the problem was.

Six months of that gave me a list.

I asked them to come into the office and sit down with me. I went through it line by line and asked, “So these are the things that are really important to you, right?” They agreed with every one. Then I had them go back through their shopping criteria and check every box that actually mattered.

And then I told them we were changing how we looked at homes. Every new listing that met their criteria, I would walk through first, by myself, for fifteen minutes. I’d take their file, and I’d be looking for anything on that list. If it had one of those problems, they would never hear about it. No more wasted afternoons.

They loved the idea.

For the next four months, I previewed every new listing that fit. None of them were right.

Then one morning, after dropping my kids off at Montessori school, I had a new listing sheet in my hand with every one of their boxes checked. I called the listing agent, got fifteen minutes in the house, and called my buyers from inside it.

I told them I had already scheduled us for 4:30 that afternoon. They met me there at 4:30 and admitted they had driven by it twice already. We walked through, and the problem list simply disappeared.

By the time that house closed, I had known them for two years.

Every “no” was part of the list

They were never indecisive. They knew exactly what they couldn’t live with — they just couldn’t name it until they were standing in a house that had it. Every showing handed me a piece of their real criteria, and for a year and a half I let each piece walk out the door with them. What they needed wasn’t a better close. It was someone keeping track.

I turned it into a rule for every buyer after them. If we had seen five homes and they still couldn’t decide, we stopped touring and sat down. We went back over the shopping list, checked the boxes that really mattered, and wrote a second list of what they absolutely didn’t want. From then on I took their file and previewed new listings myself, fifteen minutes each, instead of spending the seller’s time, my time, and theirs on houses that were never going to work.

Every year I worked in Tucson after that couple, at least five of my sales came from the same phone call, made from inside the house: This is the one. I’ve scheduled an appointment for you after work. I think you’re going to love this house.

One thing to do this week