Good morning, NREB readers.

As always, we're here to keep real estate professionals informed while cutting out the fluff. Let's get right into it.

Here is a number worth sitting with:

91% of home sellers used a real estate agent in the latest National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers.

That matches the highest share on record.

At the same time, just 5% of sellers completed a For Sale By Owner transaction, the lowest share NAR has recorded.

In an era of instant home-value estimates, listing portals, artificial intelligence, digital contracts, social media marketing, online showing tools, and more information available to consumers than ever before, sellers are not abandoning professional representation.

They are using it at historically high rates.

But the 91% is not actually the most interesting part.

The more useful question for agents is:

What are those sellers hiring an agent to accomplish?

The answers say a lot about where the profession's value still lives.

There was a time when much of the real estate industry's practical information was difficult for consumers to obtain without an agent.

That world is gone.

A homeowner can pull up recent listings on a phone.

They can look at estimated property values.

They can find mortgage calculators.

They can research neighborhoods.

They can generate listing descriptions with AI.

They can take reasonably good property photos with a device already sitting in their pocket.

They can read hundreds of articles about how to sell a house.

And despite all of that, 91% of sellers still used an agent.

That suggests the value proposition is not simply:

"I have information you cannot access."

Increasingly, the information is available.

What remains difficult is deciding what the information means, what matters for this particular property, which decision to make next, and how to coordinate the transaction when several things happen at once.

NAR's seller research reflects that.

The leading things sellers wanted from their agents were help marketing the home to potential buyers, pricing the property competitively, and selling within a specific timeframe.

Those are not information-access problems.

They are execution problems.

A seller can create an online listing.

That is not the same thing as creating a market for the property.

Those two ideas can get blurred because nearly every serious listing eventually appears online.

But visibility alone is not necessarily effective marketing.

The decisions begin before the listing goes live.

How is the property positioned against competing inventory?

Which features deserve emphasis?

What needs to be corrected before photography?

What does the first week of exposure need to accomplish?

How does the asking price affect which buyers see the property?

How does the listing compare with the other homes those buyers will tour?

What happens if activity is high but offers do not arrive?

What happens if online attention is strong but showing activity is weak?

What happens if showings are occurring but the feedback keeps identifying the same objection?

The listing itself is only one component.

Marketing is the process of creating exposure, interpreting the response, and adjusting when the response does not match the seller's objective.

That is considerably harder to automate than uploading 35 photographs.

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The second major thing sellers say they want is help pricing competitively.

That has always mattered.

The current market makes it especially important.

Over the last several years, homeowners have watched nearby properties sell through radically different environments.

A comparable home may have sold during a bidding-war market.

Another may have closed after mortgage rates jumped.

Another may have required two price reductions.

Another may have been renovated extensively.

Another may have carried seller concessions that are not obvious from the headline sale price.

Another may have sold in five days while the house next door has now been active for 70.

All of those transactions can exist inside the same seller's mental picture of "what homes around here are worth."

Online estimates cannot eliminate that complexity.

Neither can a single price-per-square-foot calculation.

A competitive asking price is ultimately a judgment about the property's position right now, against the inventory and buyers that exist right now.

That means the agent's job is not merely finding a number.

It is interpreting the market around the number.

The third major priority is easy to underestimate:

selling within a specific timeframe.

That is different from simply achieving the highest theoretical price.

A seller's move may be tied to:

a job,

a new construction completion date,

a divorce,

an estate,

retirement,

school schedules,

the purchase of another property,

a lease ending,

a relocation,

medical needs,

or simply the point at which carrying two homes becomes unacceptable.

The "best" outcome therefore depends on more than price.

Imagine two offers.

One is slightly higher but carries more uncertainty, a longer timeline, and several contingencies.

The other is lower but aligns cleanly with the seller's next move.

There is no universal answer to which one is better.

The seller's priorities determine the answer.

That is why the goal of a listing cannot be reduced to:

The actual job is closer to:

The 91% statistic becomes more understandable when viewed that way.

NAR's latest research contains another number that may be more revealing than agent use itself.

Eighty-six percent of sellers said their agent provided a broad range of services and managed most aspects of the home sale.

That is a very different description from "put my house on the internet."

A listing transaction contains dozens of small decisions that rarely appear in the marketing pitch.

Preparing the property.

Coordinating access.

Reviewing market response.

Communicating with buyers' agents.

Managing offers.

Tracking deadlines.

Working through inspection issues.

Responding to appraisal questions.

Coordinating with lenders, title or settlement professionals, attorneys where applicable, inspectors, contractors, HOAs, and other participants.

Keeping the seller informed.

Identifying a problem before it becomes an emergency.

Knowing which issue matters and which one does not.

Much of the work is unremarkable when it is done correctly.

That is part of the challenge.

A smooth transaction can make the process look easier than it was.

Think about a transaction where everything goes well.

The photographer arrives on schedule.

The property launches correctly.

Showing instructions work.

Buyer questions are answered.

Offers are organized.

Deadlines are tracked.

Inspection negotiations do not spiral.

The appraisal arrives.

The lender stays on schedule.

Closing documents appear.

The seller signs.

The transaction closes.

From the seller's perspective, it may feel straightforward.

That is the desired outcome.

But straightforward does not necessarily mean simple.

Sometimes professional value is most visible when a crisis is solved.

Other times, it is the reason the crisis never happened.

That distinction matters in a service business because consumers naturally remember the dramatic moments.

They may not see the dozen small interventions that prevented dramatic moments from occurring.

For Sale By Owner transactions accounted for only 5% of sales in NAR's latest profile, an all-time low.

It is tempting to take that number and declare that selling without an agent simply does not work.

The data deserve more care than that.

A large share of FSBO transactions are not conventional open-market sales. NAR reports that 60% of FSBO sellers knew the buyer.

That could mean a sale to a relative, friend, neighbor, tenant, or another party already connected to the seller.

Those transactions are different from putting an ordinary property on the open market and attempting to attract an unknown buyer.

The property mix differs too.

NAR has cautioned that FSBO homes are more likely to include lower-cost properties, mobile or manufactured homes, and rural properties.

That matters when looking at sale-price comparisons.

NAR reported a median FSBO sale price of $360,000, compared with $425,000 for agent-assisted transactions.

That does not prove that hiring an agent automatically adds $65,000 to the value of the same house.

The properties, locations, transaction circumstances, and sellers are not identical.

Agents should not turn a useful dataset into a claim the dataset cannot support.

The better takeaway is simpler:

Despite having more self-service technology than ever, very few sellers are choosing to navigate the entire process without professional assistance.

The problems reported by FSBO sellers are revealing too.

NAR says common difficulties include pricing the home, preparing or fixing it for sale, and selling within the desired timeframe.

Notice how closely those problems align with the things agent-assisted sellers say they want help accomplishing.

Pricing.

Preparation and marketability.

Timing.

That is probably not a coincidence.

Those are judgment-heavy parts of the sale.

A website can tell a homeowner what another house sold for.

It cannot automatically determine how much weight that sale deserves for this property.

An online checklist can tell a seller to declutter before photographs.

It cannot necessarily identify which $4,000 repair is worth addressing and which one should be left alone.

A portal can generate buyer exposure.

It cannot decide whether eight showings and zero offers mean the price is wrong, the condition is wrong, the presentation is wrong, or the market simply needs more time.

The difficult part is often not obtaining information.

It is interpreting the signal.

This is where the AI conversation becomes relevant.

Artificial intelligence can already draft listing copy, summarize documents, enhance workflows, organize information, generate marketing ideas, and answer basic consumer questions.

It will get better.

Agents should use that.

But there is a major difference between automating parts of the work and eliminating the need for judgment.

Consider pricing.

Software can identify comparable properties.

Someone still has to decide which comparables deserve the most weight.

Consider an inspection.

AI can summarize a report.

Someone still has to evaluate how the findings affect this particular negotiation and this seller's priorities.

Consider an offer.

Software can organize the terms.

Someone still has to help a seller think through the tradeoffs between price, financing, contingencies, timing, and certainty.

Technology can make execution faster.

That does not necessarily make the underlying decisions easier.

In some cases, having more information creates more decisions rather than fewer.

There is another clue in the data.

Sellers are not just choosing someone to perform tasks.

They are choosing someone to make recommendations during a transaction where the financial stakes can be enormous.

That explains why reputation, honesty, trustworthiness, referrals, and previous relationships continue to matter when consumers select agents.

The seller is delegating some degree of judgment.

Not final authority—the client makes the decisions.

But the seller expects the professional to narrow the choices, identify the consequences, and make a recommendation.

That requires trust.

A homeowner can hire the best photographer in town without trusting that person's opinion about whether to accept an offer.

The relationship with an agent is different.

The client is repeatedly asking:

What do you think we should do?

That question is difficult to replace with a search box.

The latest NAR research says 87% of sellers were likely to recommend their agent for future services.

That matters for more than customer satisfaction.

Real estate is a business where the outcome of today's transaction can become the acquisition channel for tomorrow's.

The seller who believes the process was handled well may become:

a repeat client,

a referral source,

a future buyer,

or the person who sends three neighbors your name over the next five years.

And NAR's latest Member Profile shows how important that compounding effect can become.

Experienced agents derive a substantial portion of their business from people they have already served.

That is one reason the quality of execution today has consequences far beyond one closing.

The transaction ends.

The relationship may not.

There is a dangerous way for the industry to interpret this statistic.

That is not the lesson.

Consumers are using agents at high rates because they expect something from the relationship.

Marketing.

Pricing judgment.

Transaction management.

Timing.

Negotiation.

Communication.

Problem solving.

Accountability.

The fact that consumers currently choose professional representation does not guarantee that every individual professional will continue to earn that choice.

Technology keeps improving.

Information keeps becoming easier to access.

Consumer expectations keep rising.

That means the parts of an agent's job that amount only to transmitting information are likely to become less differentiated over time.

The valuable parts increasingly involve interpreting information, applying judgment, managing complexity, and getting an outcome accomplished.

That distinction is worth taking seriously.

Agents do a lot of things during a listing.

Not every activity matters equally to the client.

A 30-item checklist can look impressive.

A 70-slide listing presentation can look comprehensive.

A sophisticated technology stack can look modern.

But sellers told NAR what they actually care about:

Market my home effectively.

Price it competitively.

Help me sell within the timeframe I need.

Those are outcomes.

The activities matter insofar as they help produce those outcomes.

That is a useful filter for any real estate professional evaluating their own business.

Instead of asking:

Ask:

Professional photography is not valuable because photography exists.

It is valuable if it improves presentation and buyer response.

A pricing analysis is not valuable because it contains 25 comparable sales.

It is valuable if it helps the seller make a better positioning decision.

Transaction coordination is not valuable because someone checks boxes.

It is valuable if deadlines are met, problems are surfaced early, and the seller reaches closing with fewer surprises.

The distinction sounds small.

It is not.

There is a useful exercise buried in this research.

Take the three major things sellers say they want:

Market the property.

Price it competitively.

Sell within the desired timeframe.

Then look at your own listing process.

For marketing:

What happens before launch?

How do you measure whether the market is responding?

What causes you to change the strategy?

For pricing:

How do you separate useful comparables from merely nearby ones?

How do you account for competing inventory?

How quickly does your pricing recommendation respond when market conditions change?

For timing:

Do you know the seller's actual deadline?

Do you understand what happens if that deadline is missed?

Does your marketing and pricing strategy reflect that reality?

Those questions are more useful than simply counting how many things are included in a listing package.

Professional value is often hardest to distinguish when everything sells immediately.

When inventory is extremely tight and buyers are fighting over nearly every acceptable listing, mistakes can be hidden by demand.

A property can launch slightly overpriced and still receive attention.

Presentation can be mediocre and buyers may still compete.

Negotiations can be less sophisticated when there are five backup offers waiting.

A more balanced market is different.

Listings can sit.

Buyers can compare.

Price reductions become more common.

Inspection issues matter.

Terms matter.

Seller expectations have to be managed over weeks rather than days.

That environment makes the quality of the underlying work easier to see.

When everything no longer sells automatically, strategy matters more.

There are plenty of ways to debate the future of real estate.

New technology.

Changing business models.

Artificial intelligence.

Online platforms.

Consumer behavior.

Industry rules.

Those conversations matter.

But sometimes the clearest answer comes from asking the people actually hiring the professional.

Nine out of ten sellers still used an agent.

And when asked what they wanted, the priorities were not mysterious.

They wanted someone to:

market the home,

price it intelligently,

and

get the transaction completed on the timeline that mattered to them.

That is not a guarantee of permanent relevance.

It is something more useful:

a description of the job consumers are still willing to hire someone to do.

The agents who remain valuable will probably not be the ones who spend the most time proving they have access to information.

They will be the ones who are best at turning information into decisions and decisions into completed transactions.

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