The call came from a client I had helped buy a house less than a year earlier. She was ready to sell, and she wanted to list it at three times what she paid.

It was an older home in Tucson. Good condition, nothing remarkable. She was talking about more than $300 a square foot, and nothing about that house supported anything close to it.

She wasn’t being greedy. She was listening to the market. Every neighbor, every headline, every sale she’d heard about told her prices only moved in one direction. She had stopped looking at her house and started looking at the mood.

I remember thinking the whole thing was ludicrous. Then the market turned, the way markets do when they run on momentum instead of value.

When I settled in Alaska for the second time, I coached lenders and agents through the mortgage crisis. Alaska had been more careful with subprime lending, and values had never gone wild, so it settled into a market I knew well. Enough homes. Enough buyers. Forty-five to ninety days to sell.

Then rates dropped to historic lows, and listings started selling in days. Multiple offers, well over asking, became normal. Buyers learned to move fast because they were afraid of missing out, and a whole generation of agents learned that this was how real estate works.

Then rates jumped.

In my last year selling in Alaska, I watched the mood flip. Buyers who would once have written an offer the first weekend stopped calling back. Sellers who didn’t have to move took their homes off the market. The ones who did list still expected frenzy prices.

It wasn’t a buyer’s market. It wasn’t a seller’s market. It wasn’t balanced, either.

It was Tucson running backward. Consumers were still deciding based on the mood, not the house. Only this time the mood was hesitation.

What the quiet actually means

Those buyers hadn’t stopped wanting to move. Families were still growing. People were still retiring, relocating, downsizing. What disappeared was the confidence to act. Wanting to move and feeling ready to move had become two different things.

That space is the decision gap, and it’s why I wrote The Decision Gap Market™. (Chapter 5 is free to read online if you want to see where the idea goes.)

Most of us were trained to move a consumer from a raised hand to a signed contract in 72 hours. When someone stopped answering, we called them cold and moved on. But most of them weren’t gone. They had moved to a different place in the Decision Gap Loop™, still wanting the home, now trying to work out whether the decision makes sense. A buyer dreaming about the extra bedroom needs something very different from a buyer running the numbers on insurance, taxes, and what waiting another year would cost.

And what do we send them? “Hey, just checking in.”

Be honest with yourself on this one. That text makes us feel better. To a buyer comparing a payment hundreds of dollars higher than it would have been a few years ago, it says nothing at all.

Consumers move with the market’s mood, not the property in front of them. When the mood is momentum, they rush. When the mood is hesitation, they go quiet.

Silence isn’t a no. It’s a decision still being made.

One thing to do this week