You ask why they want to sell, they tell you it is just time, and you move on to price and timing. In this role-play the coach asks three more short questions and then one that has nothing to do with the house at all, and the answer to that last one decides whether there is a listing here.
It is a role-play in a short clip. One person plays the agent, the other plays a seller, and the whole thing is over in a handful of lines. Watch how short the questions are.
Seller: "Yeah, I want to sell."
Agent: "What causes you to want to sell?"
Seller: "Uh well, you know, it's just time."
Agent: "Tell me more about that."
Seller: "I don't know, you know, we've thinking about it. We just want like, you know, more space."
Agent: "What's important about getting more space?"
Seller: "Uh you know, we just want everybody to have like the kids to have their own rooms, sort of thing."
Agent: "Mostly for the kids, right?"
Seller: "Yeah."
Then the coach breaks out of the role-play and tells you to keep digging on motivation, and he hands over the question he wants asked: "Is it an option for you to not sell the home and still accomplish your goal?" And straight after it, the plain version of the same question: "do you have capital separate from the equity in the home to be able to make this move happen?"
Four questions in, the reason for the move is bedrooms for the kids, not money. So the last question tests the only thing that actually matters at that table: whether selling this house is the one way to get those bedrooms, or just one of two ways.
“Is it an option for you to not sell the home and still accomplish your goal?”
The question you skip is the one that costs you three months. Most agents accept the first answer, and the first answer is always the same answer, it is just time, we need more space. Then you price the house, launch it, and find out in week six that these sellers were never moving unless somebody handed them their number, because they had another way to get what they wanted. A stated reason is not a motivation. It is the polite version of one.
Two mechanics make the ladder copyable. The questions are three and four words long, which is what keeps the seller talking instead of defending, and you feed their own words back to them until they confirm it out loud. Then you ask the test question even when you are certain of the answer. If they say yes, they could do this without selling, you have learned today what you would otherwise learn at the first price reduction, and you can decide what that listing is worth to you before you spend money on it.