By Colleen Barry, Chief Executive Officer, Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty
There’s a pattern I keep seeing, in our industry and beyond. Certain voices have built their entire platform around convincing you there’s always something to be afraid of. The market is about to crash. Rates are never coming down. Agents are leaving in droves. The business is dying.
Fear gets attention. It’s a cheap way to earn eyeballs, and the math works in the fear dweller’s favor. If they’re right, they look prophetic. If they’re wrong, everyone’s just relieved, and no one holds them accountable. Either way, they win. You don’t.
Here’s the real cost. Your brain doesn’t fully separate a thought from an experience. So, if you spend your days steeped in someone else’s doom narrative, your nervous system starts reacting like the doom is already here. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset offers a useful framework for what happens next. She argues that people tend to operate from one of two mindsets: fixed, where you believe conditions are set and out of your control, or growth, where you believe your effort and thinking shape the outcome.
Agents who marinate in fear content slide into a fixed mindset about the market. Conditions are bad. Nothing can be done. So why try? Agents with a growth mindset ask a different question: given what’s actually true right now, where’s the opportunity, and what am I going to do about it. The difference between those two agents isn’t talent. It’s which set of facts they chose to look at. So, let’s look at ours.
In most of our cities and towns, the number of transactions is stable year over year, with some modest increases. On the brighter side, we are seeing more available inventory, giving buyers more choice during their search.
Now layer in what’s happening to the agent population itself. Nationally, membership in the National Association of REALTORS® peaked near 1.6 million in 2022, at the height of the pandemic boom. It’s since settled to about 1.44 million, a pullback of roughly 10%. Many left because the market normalized and the business got harder for agents who weren’t built for it.
Here’s the part nobody frames as good news: fewer agents servicing a client pool that has stabilized. Less competition for the same buyers and sellers. More room to build the relationships, the referral base, and the reputation that this business actually rewards.
This isn’t blind optimism. It’s simply arithmetic, and it favors you. But only if you’re looking at the data instead of the headlines.
So, here’s what I’d ask of you. Before you let someone else’s fear content set your mood for the day, go check the numbers in your own market. Ask which mindset you’re bringing to what you find. The agents who win the next few years won’t be the ones who guessed right about the news cycle. They’ll be the ones who kept showing up, kept prospecting, and looked at the same data everyone else had access to and saw opportunity instead of doom.
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