KGCI: Real Estate on Air - NLP Hacks to Keep Sellers Happy During Tough Price Talks with Dan Rochon

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

SummaryThis episode features a powerful conversation with sales coach and NLP practitioner Dan Rochon, who shares his counterintuitive strategies for handling difficult conversations with sellers. The discussion reveals that your words and body language are powerful tools for managing a client's emotions, setting expectations, and guiding them to accept a necessary price reduction. You'll learn a simple but effective framework for discussing tough topics and ensuring your clients not only agree with your advice but leave the conversation feeling confident in your abilities.Key TakeawaysThe "House vs. Home" Hack: Discover a simple but powerful NLP technique. Dan explains that when talking to sellers, you should refer to their property as a "house" to help them emotionally detach from it. When talking to a buyer, use the word "home" to create a deeper emotional connection. This simple linguistic shift can dramatically change how a client responds to a pricing conversation.Master the Pre-emptive Strike: Learn how to address potential pricing issues before they become a problem. The episode provides a blueprint for using communication to set realistic expectations with a seller from the very beginning, making a future price reduction discussion less of a shock and more of a logical step in a defined process.The Power of Reframing: Understand that the way you frame a situation can completely change how a seller perceives it. The discussion highlights how to reframe a low offer or a slow market not as a loss, but as an opportunity to implement a strategic plan that will lead to a successful sale.Teach to Sell, Don't Tell to Sell: Dan emphasizes that your job is to guide your clients to the right decision, not to force them. The episode shares how to use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and open-ended questions to help a seller come to the logical conclusion on their own, which builds trust and confidence in your expertise.Topics:Dan RochonNLP for real estatePrice reduction scriptsSeller psychologyTough conversationsCall-to-ActionReady to master tough talks with sellers? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and transform your communication skills!

Have you ever had to call a seller and recommend a price drop? Has that conversation scared the freaking daylight out of you? Well, if you're wondering how the best listing agents handle tough conversations with their sellers, then today's show is for you. We've got Dan Roshan with us, who, get this, has had no broke months in real estate sales since 2008, with an average of 10 monthly sales. He now leads a team of four in Fairfax, Virginia. He's also the author of the real estate evolution, the 10-step guide to consistent and predictable income,

and he's the host of his own show called No Broke Months. We're about to get dirty with Dan today, and here's what you can expect to learn. What words to use when talking to buyers versus what words to use when talking to sellers. Yes, they are different. How to talk to a seller about a price drop and have them leave the conversation happy about it. How to make sellers love you and trust you, so much that they tell all their friends how great you are. Guys, you're listening to the Real Estate Rockstars podcast, the show for agents who've been around

the block and are finally ready to build sustainable, scalable businesses that you actually love. My name is Shelby Johnson. And in case you haven't heard, after a year of hosting this beautiful podcast, I've decided to hand back the reins so I can fully focus on building my agent business from the ground up in a brand new city after closing hundreds of transactions back in the day in a different city and state. So guys, August 2024 is my last month hosting. So if you want to follow the journey

from Ground Zero in my agent, business, head over to Instagram at The Shelby Show. But for today, Rockstars, welcome. Dan Rochon. You've done this a couple times now. You mentioned house versus home.

What's the logic there? Well, the emotional appeal for a buyer. As a listing agent, when I'm talking to a seller, I want to remove their emotional ties. I don't want them thinking about their kids that they raised in that home. So when I'm talking to buyers, I want them to have that feeling that the word home presents. So we go back into how to use languaging. So that's a very, very basic communication skill of listening and paying attention to words

and changing the words based off of who you're speaking with. So if I'm speaking to a buyer, Shelby, I've got this wonderful home that I think may really, really be best for you and what you're sharing with me, versus I'm talking to Shelby, the seller, Shelby. Listen, we can get a lot of money for this property.

I can tell you that, right? And so you can see where, one, even the pacing of my words, when I'm talking about home, I slowed down. right i was speaking to your energy of of envisioning i didn't say family right because that may be a fair housing thing but i was thinking of family in my mind i was thinking about um imagine that you and your family are moving into this home i'm not going to use the words family though because you don't want to that's a fair housing thing there right and so but i'm i'm imagining that inside as i'm communicating

And then when I'm talking about selling, I'm imagining you getting a ton of money. Right. So I'm imagining something different because you're in a different spot. Same person, same human being, but just in a different spot. And now I'm matching my words, my tonality, my energy based off of the situation that you're in. Does this correlate with framing slash reframing? Can you talk about framing if it applies in what we're discussing now? So framing is really just taking a look at a situation and positioning it so that it is accommodating what you wanted to have happen, right?

So a simple example of framing could be I was teaching about failure. Okay, so some people will frame failure as failure. Some people like me, and I'm sure like you, Shelby as well, and if you're listening to this right now, then we already know that you're an educated, or at least that you desire to have education, right? And so some people will take a setback and they'll frame it as a failure and other people will take that same setback and they'll frame it as an opportunity to learn. Okay, same thing happens. It's just how are you going to frame it? Okay. So now in sales is the same type of thing.

I had a conversation earlier today with a seller who's overpriced right now. He's going on, he's been on the market for 25 days. The average days on the market are 31 days in his marketplace. And so I give him a call when I say to him, I say, Steve, that's his name. I say, Steve, I just want to let you know that the market herein, and I say the town, by the way, herein, that's another languishing thing right there. So that listing is about an hour and a half from where I live. But anytime I'm talking to anybody, it's always herein.

Because it makes it, again, you're speaking to the subconscious of, you know, I'm your neighbor. All right. So I say, I said, so the market right now, Steve, here in his town, on average is 31 days. Now, the good news is we haven't gotten to 31 days yet. So I'm framing it to him, right? Say, this is great news. And the even better news is, is if we make an adjustment to anything, we still have time right now to be able to respond to the market expectations, to respond to what it is that the buyers are suggesting and what they're saying. And even though we've not hit the average days on right now, but we are suggesting, based off of the limited showings that we have, is that maybe we may want to look at the price. Now, I'm not telling you to adjust your price.

However, if we're really paying attention to the market, we may sit there and recognize that maybe we might want to adjust the price. And again, I'm not telling you what to do, but if it was me, I would probably adjust the price by about $20,000, but it's not me, it's you. So what should we do? So that's like a whole bunch of stuff that I just threw at you right there on a price adjustment conversation.

I could probably, if we had more time, sort of decide, you know, like pull out every little segment of what I just did there, right? But it's going through and you're framing it. So it's good news rather than bad news. It's basically, you know, what I just did there in a price adjustment conversation. And I actually would like to, like dive into that a little bit. I think that was

excellent and very helpful for a lot of people I'm sure listening who have gone through this where you know they list a property and in there they know it's overpriced you know and they've already tried to handle objections and clearly you know didn't get there ended up listing it at the price that the seller had in mind even if it was against what they thought. But now they're there and they want to have this conversation and this I think was a really good like example of exactly what they could do.

So yeah, you started with the good news. And then you said even better news, you know, we have this time to respond to the market expectations and how buyers are responding. At no point in time where you like, hey, it's overpriced, like we need to drop. You know, this is what I think. It was the market or it was the buyer's response and the evidence that you've seen. And then you turned it and let the seller make their own decision. The other thing I really like, too, is that you were like, hey, if it was me, I would adjust the but ultimately, like, it's your decision.

And I've given you this information, what would you like to do with it type of thing? So the other piece of this is that I didn't mention there is to be able to have that conversation, you've got to make sure that you're communicating. So that's a seller. I've communicated with him five days a week for the last three weeks. All right. So he's been a seller, a client of mine for around three and a half weeks now.

And because I'm communicating with him five days a week, then I eliminate the choice that the seller wants to make, which is my agent sucks, when the reality of it is is that it's overpriced. So the only way that I eliminate that as a choice that my agent sucks is by me communicating with him five days a week. Oh, guess why? What? Guess why five days a week?

Because I want to take the weekends off. Okay. Right? All right. So it not only does it allow for me to be able to overcame. communicate to him so that he can't lay that blame back on me for it not selling easily. It also gives me freedom of the way I spend my time. Okay.

So if I want to be able to have freedom of the way I spend my time, then I'm able to communicate excessively. So there's people listening right now and they're like five days a week. I have no idea what to say to this person. I feel like I'd be bothering them. Like, am I calling them? Can you like, what do you actually do for five days a week, three weeks, in a row to not just be annoying.

Before I answer that question, once upon a time, my daughter Maggie was three years old. And she went to this school, this Montessori school in Arlington, Virginia. And I moved to live in the home that I live in now. And the Montessori school was too far for us to commute to. And so I changed school. So now she's three and a half years old. She's going to a Montessori school in Centerville, Virginia. And about maybe three months into the,

this, I'm like, man, this school is horrible. Like, why is this school horrible? One of the things is that the new school had said that we could come by any Friday and come in and just audit the class, unannounced and come in and just see things. So one Friday I go in there. And I realize that the new school, the new Montessori school is just as good as the old Montessori school. This is a Friday.

I'm like, my goodness, what's causing me to believe that this new school is not as good as the old one? well what I realized was was the first school the difference between the schools was the first school the the owner of it would text me three times a week she would email me three times a week she would call me once a week and in fact it was so outrageous that when we would go to the to the playground as a parents we would sort of be like jokingly sort of talking a little bit like oh my goodness Is she telling you all this? All right.

So that was the experience as a consumer that I had. And yeah, it was a little bit like, my goodness, this is a little bit over the top. But pay attention. Each school was just as good. The school that over communicated to me to the point that it was a little bit annoying, I thought was so much better than the school that did communicate with me at all. So first of all, if I get a complaint from a consumer, that I'm over communicating with them, I'll take that all day long.

Secondly, what do you communicate? Well, what you communicate is when you take the listing, for example, one of the things that I do is I put into an auto search into that community for every time that new active listing comes in, a price reduction, something goes under contract, and I put a map search on there, and I get emailed, not the client. And I get emailed now that gives me something that I could give them a call or send them a text on. I can say, hey, Steve, I just want to let you know, one, two, three, Main Street just got placed

in the market. I just want to let you know that. That's an example of something that I could communicate with them. Every single month, around the 10th or 11th of the month, if you use getsmartchurch.com, they update their reports from the previous month about the supply, the demand, the original list price to the sole price, et cetera. And around the 11th of the month, I have my staff go through and get those reports for every single of our listings, and then they give them the update on that. You can go to the MLS, and you can go in and you can find different reports in the MLS

to be able to find different data points to be able to communicate with them. So if you have no feedback for showings, obviously you should be doing that. If you have nothing to be able to notify them about an upcoming open house or wherever the case may be, you can manufacture things. It's not really manufactured,

but you can find things, such as market reports, such as economic reports, such as the interest rates just lowered, that's great news. Hey, Steve, I want to let you know, interest rates just lowered this past week. Hopefully, that's going to allow for us to get some more activity on your property, right? And so it's about, you know, being a true professional. So the challenge is most real estate agents don't treat this like a profession. And what would a true professional do?

They would know the market. They would be the market economists of choice for real estate. And then they would take and they would help to interpret that data for their consumer. Okay. And so if you're just looking for like some easy wins of what to communicate, communicate new listings, active listings, price reduction, etc. In the neighborhood, go in and find a bunch of market reports from the MLS, from different tools and resources, remind, get smart charts, whatever you got available to you.

ask your broker if you can't figure it out, ask your mentor if you can't figure it out, and be able to communicate that stuff to them regularly. That's gold. How are you communicating this with your seller? Are you doing a bunch of different channels, or is this like, are you a call guy, are you a text, or you email, what do you do? I'm a call guy, but I have, so the way that I actually do it in real life is I will talk to my clients twice a week.

and then I have my assistant talk, text, or email five times a week. Okay. And so every single morning we go through our metrics. We go through our daily KPIs. And we go through, you know, say I have, you know, anywhere in the ballpark of nine to 20 clients, you know, whatever it may be. And so we go through every single one of those clients. Okay, did me, Dan, the agent, when was the last, excuse me, when was the last time I spoke with them? If it was last Monday, hey, they're not acceptable.

I got to give them a call a day. I report back to my staff. I hold myself accountable. But in the same sense, I just use a simple spreadsheet, one, two, three, Main Street, and there's a little checkbox. There should be a check in that box so that I know somebody contacted them yesterday. And I'm not as concerned about the way we communicate with them as I am the fact that we're communicating. And I actually prefer to do it in different ways because I think that the consumer, you know,

some like text, some like email, some like calls. And, you know, I think it's irresponsible. You know, I often hear the objection of, well, my client, they like to text. Well, first of all, really? How do you know that? Secondly, texting is a really poor vehicle for communicating especially important things because you go back into like what we're talking about earlier today about NLP, non-minguistic programming.

when somebody reads a text, and if they're having a bad day, for example, I can almost guarantee they're going to read that text and interpret it in a bad way. So I am not going to let my communication rely on only text. Now, it's a part of it. But if I am only relying on text, I think that you're being irresponsible in your communication, or at least it's not the best way you can do so. I agree. And I feel like it's just a huge missed opportunity because you're right.

Like I will text out something or do the same thing in like a, voice message or a video message. And then you can take the same message and add like all of the energy, excitement, the tonality, the pacing, like all of those things that takes those words and transforms it into, oh, wow, I can't believe, you know, that was great. I love this human. Yeah. And I love what you just said there, Shelby.

So just take out your phone. Just instead of saying, hey, Steve, just want to let you know, I've got a showing schedule for tomorrow, 3 p.m. I'll give you a call tomorrow, let you know. Boom. Videotate that on your phone. Less than 10 seconds, you hit send. Now, how much, you know, how much more are they going to love you than if I just

set the same thing in a text? It's totally different. For sure. Okay. I, I freaking loved this little gem. I feel like we could deep dive on this for a while. But in specific to this topic or what we've talked about so far today, what did we not hit on that you think would be important for our listeners?

Yeah. So one of the philosophies that I share of all the years that I've been doing this is what I call Teach to Sell. Okay. And so what I want to leave you with today is for you for the listeners, the audience to consider about Teach to Sell as a way to be able to get more clients, as a way to be able to keep more clients, make more sales. So what is Teach to Sell? So think about when you were a kid. You had a teacher who was your favorite. That teacher. taught you something. It probably wasn't algebra. It wasn't history. It wasn't science. It was something like maybe it was your first breakup with that stinky boy or the stinky girl. Or maybe it was like something going on in your life, you know, at home or whatever. Or maybe you had zits on your face and you just had like this self-image thing or whatever the case may be. But you had this teacher who made a difference for you. And so if you're listening to this right now, I want you to think of who is that teacher, who was that teacher. Now, imagine that the teacher came in and knocked on your door right now, or if you're driving, wherever you get to Starbucks or wherever you're going, that they came and they sat down next to you.

And they come in and they say to you, Shelby, I got some advice for you. I haven't seen you two years, Shelby. It's been so long since you've been in elementary school. And so I've got some advice for you. Now, let me ask you a question. Would you listen to that teacher's advice? 100% yes. Right.

And so now you go back and you say, why would you listen to that teacher's advice? Because they earned your trust. Okay. And so now if you could take this concept as a salesperson and you take the things that we're sharing with you earlier, I was sharing with you earlier about like, well, what do you communicate with your sellers?

Well, all I'm doing there is, I'm teaching them. I'm teaching them the expectations of the market. I'm teaching them the economics of the market. I'm teaching them the different things that impact, you know, such as supply and demand, such as interest rates, such as the media. I'm teaching them the things that are going to impact the sale of their property. Okay.

And so now as I'm teaching them, I'm gaining their trust. just like that teacher who you just had in your mind that came in and sat next to you and said, Shelby, I got some advice to you. It's really great to see you. And you would, without fail,

absolutely yes, listen to them. Listen to them. All right. So that's the same way as a sales professional that we could approach our business. And when you teach to sell,

then you're going to be able to earn more trust, you're going to be able to help more clients, and you're going to be able to make more money easier. Yeah, that makes sense. And I hadn't really thought of it like that before, but when you were having me imagine my, I didn't actually imagine a teacher, I imagined a coach, is my gymnastics coach. And I'm like, man, if he walked in the room right now, anything he had to say, I would just be hanging on every word, you know, because of the respect and the trust and all the things. So yeah, that was a really good image to help understand the type of thing that you're teaching for agents to gain that kind of relationship with clients. Yeah. And it's not just

he didn't teach you gymnastics. There was something I bet that was happening in your life right there that he was a mentor to you, a resource for you, right? It just wasn't, hey, here's a triple, what they call them the grant? Not the granny. Not the granny. What's the thing? Make it up. All right. I'm just going to make it up. Gainer? Not a gainer. No. I don't know.

Okay. It's a thing. Whatever you're thinking of, it's for sure that. Whatever it is, that's probably not what he taught you. He taught you that, but it was also probably helped you in life more so to figure out life. So now, as a real estate professional, as an agent, when you recognize that you're there not just to give a CMA, but you're there to be able to help them. figure out the emotional experience of the transaction, right? Let me leave you with this, because I know we're running out of time, but what's the sellers? What's the buyers? What are they

experiencing? They're experiencing the anxiety of a new job, the stress of my kids going to a new school, or maybe they have memories associated with the home, or maybe they have financial problems or maybe they're getting divorced or getting married or having a baby or their kids going to college or whatever the case may be. As professionals, our consumers are almost 100% of the time experiencing another life event. Now, when we recognize that, maybe they're probate, maybe there's a death, maybe, you know, there's all kinds of different reasons why people call us. And when we recognize that as professionals and we meet them where they are in their emotional journey and we're there as that resource, not just to teach backflips, but we're there as that professional to also be that resource where if it's a divorce, you can say to the client, say, listen, I'm not here to represent you. And I'm not here to represent your soon-to-be ex-spouse.

I'm here to help you both equally. And I don't have one of your interests in front of the others. I've got your interest together that is vital and important. I'm going to help you both individually and collectively. Because I know what you're experiencing right now is something that maybe there's some good in it, but there's certainly going to be some bad in it as well. And I want to make certain that this transaction is not going to be, adding to whatever challenges that the two of you have so that you could trust me and rely on me,

I got your back. And that's the way that you could approach, you know, that one scenario. So it's more than just the basics. Dan, someone's listening right now. Multiple people are listening. And they want more from you. They're like, what does Dan provide? What does he have to offer? Also, where can I find more of him online? So hit us with all of that. Yeah, www. www. nobrokemonths.com. Nobroke months.com, nobroke months.com.

No broke months.com. And when you go to that website, you can sign up for one of our classes that we do on a regular basis to learn more about normal linguistic programming, to learn about how to strike relationships to achieve self-fulfillment, how to avoid the number one sales mistakes so you never face rejection again, and how to be able to get the most, not just out of your sales career, but out of your life. And so that's nobrook months.com. Visit that site.

And I would love to meet you face-to-face online. I do classes every single month. They're live and they're free. Perfect. Love it. Go and check out everything Dan has to offer. And guys, you know the drill. If you want more from me or the owner of the show,

we are The Shelby Show and Erin Namuchis Staggy on the gram. Otherwise, that is all we have for today. Dan, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. day. And real estate rock stars, thanks for listening. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.